CONTENTS

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Article 1: Offline Web Marketing Ideas

dezinNEWS

Article 2: So How Many Hits Did My Site Get

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OFFLINE WEB MARKETING IDEAS

Offline marketing is when more traditional advertising options are used to drive traffic to your website or blog. These include print, television, radio and direct mail advertising.

The world that is not internet based has the constraint of geography and location, so the least expensive forms of marketing are going to be bound by your location and where you advertise. This can be a challenging for websites that are of a global nature and can be quite beneficial for those websites who are focused on a certain geographical location such as your city, parish/county or state. Some feel that offline marketing is a waste of time, but in fact, every site should practice some form of offline promotion. These efforts are called drive to web programs and they can be very successful.

There are two important pieces to all promotion, and they become even more important in promoting your website. Just like the online world, your success at offline promotion is going to hinge on putting your message in front of the prospect in the right context – meaning at the right time and when they are in the right mood to perform the action you are looking for, which in this case is a visit to your website.

Two elements are necessary for a successful offline marketing campaign – the idea and the target audience. Once you figure out how you're going to do it, you need to determine where you're going to do it. If your type of web business won't lend itself well to local leads, passing out business cards isn't going to work as an offline marketing idea. Every site could benefit from offline leads – it's just a matter of how much time and money you want to spend.

So here are seven ideas with an explanation of the idea, cost and target audience for each:

1. Address It. Use your web address on EVERYTHING Most people get it on their business cards but leave it off many equally important items that become marketing materials. These include letterheads, press releases, yellow page ads, newspaper advertising, radio and TV ads, company vehicles, brochures, sell sheets, the bottom of every page of your catalog. Wherever there is a telephone number there should be both a URL and contact email address that is generic (info@domain.com)
   
   Cost: Nothing. You're already paying for the materials anyway
   Audience: Global, because all of your marketing materials travel all over the place, and your ads should be seen and heard everywhere in the markets you choose
   
   
2. Web cards. You can get business cards pretty cheap these days. What you want to do is to duplicate the look, colors and feel of your website on your cards. A snapshot of your homepage is perfect and put your web address right in the middle in huge letters. Put a short description of the site and maybe your email and/or telephone number, and give them out.
   
   Cost: Minimal
   Audience: More locally focused, because you are handing them out
   
   
3. Contact. Make every customer contact an offline marketing opportunity. Remember the webcards from the above? It's a no-brainer to hand them out directly to customers, right? How about paper clipping a couple of them to an invoice or statement or other correspondence with a small post-it note personally written by you asking them to keep one of the cards and give the other one to someone who might be able to use it. If you spend enough time building relationships with your customers they should be happy to help. Be sure to thank them for any referrals.
   
   Cost: Minimal
   Audience: Sort of like offline marketing meets chain letter idea that has potential. Global in scope
   
   
4. Referral Bribes. This is a great idea, because it works both offline and online. For online you can send an email to your customers or put a link on your pages. There are tools like refer-a-buddy for websites and there are plenty of free refer this page to a friend scripts out there. Offer your current customers an incentive to refer new customers. Maybe it's a coupon for a percentage off their next order, or an entry into a prize raffle or something else of value. This encourages people to tell you who referred them so you can see who's helping you out. For the offline equivalent, make up a coupon and hand it out to people to hand out to other people. Always send a thank you to people who refer other people, even if you bribe them.
   
   Cost: A little to a lot, depending on the bribe
   Audience: Global, if you combine offline with online
   
   
5. Promotional items. These are little gifts emblazoned with your web address that you give out to people. The web card could actually be considered a promotional item, but they usually are stuff we have on our desk or around our house like paperweights, coffee cups, T-Shirts, refrigerator magnets and other stuff. These can be very effective, but they can also be very expensive. If you come up with a well-designed coffee cup or paperweight it will end up on the desk of your customer, where everyone that comes into his office can see it. Make sure the URL is prominent, and try to make it fun and unique.
   
   Cost: Depends on the amount you want to spend
   Audience: Global, depending on where you send them
   
   
6. Direct Mail with a personalized offer. Your success with this is going to depend on how well you target your prospects and the quality of your offer. If you have a super-niche site, subscription-based site, or high-ticket niche item this idea is probably a winner for you, though it may get expensive. There are mailing lists for everything. Put together a mailing list and a good offer, like a trial subscription or free gift or special coupon or free knick-knack or something like that. Use a well-designed, neat, personalized letter with a personalized web address, and send them off to redeem their offer. Use a personalized splash page and a good offer.
   
   Cost: Fairly expensive to very expensive.
   Audience: Global
   
   
7. The World as Your Billboard. If there is opportunity in a more local focus for your drive to web program, you should figure out how to get your web address in front of as many people as you can locally. Creative and unique wins the day. I've seen posters, yard signs, billboards, bumper stickers, pens and pencils, car window signs. Think about it and come up with something good. Don't clutter them with text. Use your URL and a few descriptive words: www.yankeewine.com - Bigger is better. One person had bookmarks made up and inserted them into books at the local bookstore (owned by a friend) in relevant categories. Brilliant. Another person created PDF viral marketing kits for site fans to spread the word in their town. Another brilliant idea.
   
   Cost: Inexpensive
   Audience: Local

Always, always, always have business cards, web cards, brochures, promotional items or some offline marketing medium on you, because you never know when an opportunity to pass them out will arise. I have a supply of business cards and brochures in my car and they have come in handy at some of the most unexpected times.

So How Many Hits Did My Site Get?

A web statistic program is a system that helps you determine the true impact of your web site. By measuring the popularity of your documents, as well as identifying the sites that access your server most often, the program provides valuable marketing information. By determining the paths your users follow and analyzing the sites from which they come, the program helps you find out which outside sites are most important to you. Practically all organizations, whether commercial, educational or nonprofit, need solid numbers to make credible claims about the World Wide Web. Your web statistic program fills that need.

The most important thing to know is not how many hits or visits you have, the key is in knowing how they got there and what they did while they were there. A thousand haphazard visits are worth nothing to a single targeted visit, which produces results. So forget about how many hits you have and instead focus on what made each visit unique and what you can do to your site to increase the time a visitor spends there.

Each web hosting company offers their own software but most all of them share the common basics. In this article, the first of a series, we are going to discuss those basics and do a case study so that you can have a better understanding of how it all works.

First, let’s bring some clarity to the two most common and yet misunderstood words: Hit, and Visit.

A hit is any request made on your web site. This includes page views, requests for images and requests for downloadable files. A visit is a group of hits while a computer is on your site for a given time frame. In other words, a single visitor can cause many hits but is only filed as a single visit during the time they are on your site. Don’t forget that a visitor can visit your site more than once, thus effecting your hit count.

Forget about hits and visits and let’s focus on something more important, the trail of a visit. A "trail" is basically what pages, in what order a visitor goes to while on your site. Commonly followed trails represent useful information about the preferred routes that your visitors follow. By knowing which trails are the most common, lets you know where your most valuable content is located and what content needs to be improved.

Visits and Trails Your web statistic program can measure "visits" to your site, in addition to simple page counts. You have control over the definition of a visit. Visit counts "smooth out" fluctuations caused by the different software programs used by different users, resulting in a more accurate count of true user sessions. It can also track the most commonly followed "trails" through your site, revealing what your customers are really after and the path they follow to get there. Trails can even begin with pages on other sites! Advanced features allow you to discover how many users came from a particular site and ended up at a particular page.

CASE STUDY Following is a detailed case study of a website for a given week. See the full size of each of the images below by clicking on them.

Figure 1 shows a summary of hits for the given week.	Figure 2 shows a summary of visits for the given week.	Figure 3 shows a summary of page views per visit per the given week.	Figure 4 shows a summary of time spent per visit per the given week.
Figure 5 shows a summary of repeat visitors per the given week.	Figure 6 shows the most common entry points per the given week.	Figure 7 shows the most common exit points per the given week.	Figure 8 shows the most common site paths taken for the given week.

SUMMARY AND INTERPRETATION

SUMMARY So for the given week we had 8,803 hits with 1,423 visits. Of those visits we had an average of 1,780 page views or 1.25 page views per visitor. On average, each visitor spent 2 minutes and 10 seconds per visit. The most common entry point (176) by far was the homepage (index.html). The most common exit point (148) was also the homepage. And by studying the site paths or trails I see that the most interest was in the web services and web portfolio parts of the website.

INTERPRETATION So each visitor only viewed 1.25 pages per visit and only spent 2 minutes per visit. By having the most common entry point also being the most common exit point, this raises the question about what is happening on the homepage. And by knowing that the most interest for this given week was the web services, it might be wise to increase the web service exposure on the homepage so as the visitor will want to study further the services that are offered.

Now, it is not necessarily time to dump the homepage and start over but instead the key to getting a full grasp on the data is to repeat this process of analyzing information at least every other week. Then a trend in the visits, entry points, exit points and site trails will become evident. Remember, this is data and data is to be collected over a period of time and then with a large amount of averages, an educated guess can be made as to the next course of action.

In the next article, we will study the involvement of keywords, referring sites, search engines and more.