By Karl Moore

See also The Top Five Promotion Tips, The Three Rules of Banner Ad Success, Your Guide to Internet Success : The Best Advice Ever, The Traffic Generating Secret.

Eighty-percent of web hosts provide site statistics. But do you ever bother to look at them? Probably not... tut, tut ... you're missing out on valuable visitor information, kiddo! Every time a surfer hits your site, a note is made in your server "log". This records whom the visitor is, where they came from, how much information they downloaded, what time they arrived plus a bundle of other stuff. Collating all this information together can help you identify trends at your site.

For example, you may find most of your visitors use Internet Explorer v4. Therefore, you could start developing content specific to that browser. Or you could tell just which other sites are linking to yours, so you can send a small "Thank You" e-mail. Or just maybe you want to analyze those peak-visiting times. It's all in the log!

Accessing this information is different in the case of every hosting service - contact yours for further clarification. But less of the technical whatnots - let's take a case study of my own website, IT Gossip.net.

Only the Elite, Dear. Only The Elite

When the IT Gossip.net news site was founded last year, I had initial expectations of it reaching only a very "elite audience". The site provides daily Internet gossip and computer industry news, so I expected professionals to keep on visiting - the kind that use Windows 98 and earn $$$$'s per hour. OK, perhaps I was wrong.

However, I designed my site accordingly - using the latest technologies. I used Internet Explorer prompts and JavaScript clocks. I designed the site for 15" monitors. Yet after a long, hard look at six months of logs, I noticed a peculiar trend. Most of my visitors weren't using the latest browsers. And most of them weren't earning $$$$'s per hour. Oh no. My site was reaching a much wider audience - and so I organized the great change.

Within a week of analyzing these stats, the site had undergone a complete change. From the background color to every single archived news story. The site was now completely rid of any frames, JavaScript or IE prompts - and it gave me a chance to apply a completely universal look to the site.

Further Success

Since the change, IT Gossip.net has tripled in popularity. It's wider audience means greater acceptability. Site visits are up to 25,000 per day. Users are joining our site community. People are subscribing to the newsletter. Our ledgers are back in the blue!

And the moral of the story is simply this; treat Netizens as household guests. Give them what they want, when they want it!

Until my next article, folks. Bye!

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