Today we passed the 100 visitor mark according to Google. We also have two new customers and two new newsletter sign-ups. This is better than our plan has called for but we know we can do better. We certainly don't think there is anything statistically to rest our hat on. The reason I wanted to blog this was simply to highlight the benefits of having analytics. Here are some of things that Google Analytics is telling us.

When I look at this chart, I like the trend. There appears to be a nice upward swing and most Internet marketers will tell you that getting organic traffic this early is indeed unusual. Remember that we had pages in our site being indexed before even the home page was cached in Google. I thought this was unusual only because I'd never seen this before but having discussed this with our SEO gurus, they brought up the fact that Google indexes web PAGES, not necessarily web sites. Since we were hyperlinking directly to pages within the site and not the home page, the anomaly makes sense.

So want to know where this traffic is comming from?

This will give you some sense of how you too can get immediate traffic to your site. Our initial thought was that while we were building up the organic traffic (by submitting articles mostly) we wanted some traffic to come to our site immediately so we could start testing some landing pages to generate conversions. We've actually received more organic traffic that we expected.

CRAIGSLIST. Craigslist is the 7th most visited site on the web. Don't ignore it especially if you are selling to a market that fits one of the for sale categories in Craigslist. We show our clients how specifically to get traffic directly from Craigslist to your site. It's very effective.

This proves that it is possible to get traffic from Craigslist. We submitted a few ads on Craigslist in creative services and Arts & Craft sales. That traffic is both immediate and fleeting however. Craigslist is a first in, first out system. You are at the top of the list when you submit and slowly get pushed down. You can become virtually invisible in a day. There are some things you can do to improve visiblity in Craigslist and we are just starting to optimize our listing for Craigslist searches. Just remember that Craigslist is not a permenant solution and you will have to keep coming back to maintain this type of traffic. Still, not bad work if you can get it! It kept us on plan and we even picked up a client from here.

ARTICLES. Notice also that we have website traffic from ezinearticles.com and sitepronews.com. We have submitted articles to both of these sites and that has in turn driven traffic back to our site. That has also allowed us to generate in-bound links that have helped us rank web pages for keywords that we want our site to be indexed for.

 KEYWORDS. We did our homework and we are reaping the rewards. We teach our clients how to do this as well. Our goal is to optimize this site to develop 500-1000 hits a day over the next couple of years. Traffic growth requires CONSTANT attention and we've committed to doing that. Web hits snowball so we're not concerned that this first month of Build-a-web-shop might seem slow. We're right where we want to be and our trends all indicate that we are moving in the right direction.

THANKS FOR VISITING OUR SITE!

Greg Newell