Business Needs Blog – Why?

sugeng — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:00:39 +0000

Blogging is getting very popular. Businesses are also getting on board of the blogging trend. On the other hand, there are also many businesses that are still reluctant to touch blogging preferring to stick with the normal website. The fact is that business needs blog. Why?

Here are few points that hopefully can change your mind on the needs of business to have blog:

1. Keep in touch with current customers
Blog is the most effective way to keep in touch with current customers. Providing the option for visitors to register to receive emails when the blog is updated, blog is the best way to keep in touch with the visitors. The customers will be able to know the latest the business is offering and the promotions the business is having.

2. Update visitors of new developments in the company
Through the blog, the company can easily update the visitors of the latest developments. These can be new products, new services, new promotions or even a new season sale with special pricing for a limited period. In fact, you can also provide downloadable discount voucher from the blog to encourage visitors to purchase from you.

3. Reach out to potential customers
Similar to the previous points, visitors are your potential customers. You can use the blog to turn those people to become your customers with correct message and promotions.

4. Share company expertise
You can also use the blog to share your company expertise. We are not talking about free sharing of the company’s intellectual properties. Some special knowledge can be shared freely. With generous sharing, your company will be seen as the expert in your field.

5. Offer company view on certain topics
With blog, the company can also offer opinion on certain public topics. It does not have to be official but the blog will be able to broadcast your company view effectively.

6. Solicit feedback from visitors
An important feature of blog is the comment section. It allows your visitors to leave comments. This allows effective two-way communication. Of course you can control which comments you desire to appear on your blog. This is important to prevent garbage. When you are blogging long enough, you will realize that not all comments are related and some are even outright spams with uninvited advertisement.

7. Collect ideas and suggestions for product and service improvements
Through the blog, you can also create polling or survey for people to provide their feedback and suggestions. Some people even use blog as the customer support helpdesk with the capability to turn the postings into FAQ list.

8. Build additional web traffic
If done properly, blog can easily achieve higher ranking with search engines. It is due to the blog nature with regular fresh content rich with keywords. Through the blog, you can link back to your main website. With this link, the blog should be able to channel more traffic to your website. Personally I believe this is an amazing feature of blog for small business.

9. Quicker to update and more cost effective to maintain
Blog is very easy to update and maintain. You don’t need a whole IT department to deploy and support your blog. Even installing the blog software is relatively straight-forward. After configuring the blog with desired features, you are practically self-sufficient. You don’t even need to tweak the technicalities to continue posting and maintaining your blog.

Understanding Website Traffic

sugeng — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 01:00:27 +0000

Website traffic is crucial. Understanding website traffic is even more crucial. Traffic is an important part of business website or blogs. Traffic information is very important to the success of website marketing program. Your business will only prosper when you have a flow of people visiting your website daily. You need to know about how many came, who are visiting, where the people are from, who referred the people and when they came. You need all the information to determine how successful the marketing program, how best to do fine-tuning and to achieve better traffic result. There are many traffic tools available over the internet. Some are free and others are not. They also differ in terms of efficiency and depth of reports available.

Besides having suitable traffic tools, you also need to understand web traffic analysis based on the report from the tools. Looking at the output of any web traffic tools, you need to understand the terms being used. There are three measurements that are normally used with web site traffic. They are hits, pages and visits.

Hits can be a big number but not really meaningful. It can be misleading. Hits are calculated according to how many times all the components of a single page are requested. A single web page may require few requests as it may contain few elements each calculated separately. Each element requires one request. For blogs, since there could be many elements on one web site, the hits for one single page request can be quite high. Examples of page element are the HTML page itself, external style sheets, external JavaScript files and each graphic image.

Pages are also called page views. This is more meaningful as it counts the actual single page display. A page contains many elements and the page view should only count that as one to be accurate. We don’t really care how many times an element is requested, but we are very interested in knowing how many times a page is displayed. Page view is also called unique page view.

Visits are even more current. It is a traffic number that counts the visit by a unique visitor. It is tied to the ability to distinguish between different people visiting your web site at the same time. A visit is usually considered as one or more page views from a unique user within an hour. If another visit is done after more than one hour, it would be counted as another visit.

If you host your own web sites, you may have access to the web log files. A log file records every hit registered by the web server. These data are raw and unfiltered. It is not easy to read and understand the log files. However the information can be very useful especially in understanding the nature of traffic visiting your web site. It is a worthwhile effort learning to read traffic log files.

Traffic tools can be installed locally or hosted externally (web-based) by third party. Examples of locally installed tools are The Webalizer, Urchin (from Google), AWStats and WebTrends. Your web host might have one or more of these already available. Visit the links to learn more about how to better utilize the tools and understand the reports.

Examples of web-based tools are Site Meter, StatCounter and Google Analytics. Those are free of charge. If you need more variety of website traffice tools, here are two sites that have a collection of many such tools available: Analytics Toolbox: 50+ Ways to Track Website Traffic by Mashable and Track Website Traffic: 40+ Great Tools by Technology Magazine.

Internet Business Toolbox» Website Traffic

Business Needs Blog – Why?

Understanding Website Traffic