*My site is now growing consistently every month.

Now, some significant points: Hits mean nothing! Don't put a hit counter on your site! First of all, unless you are getting massive traffic, it will only serve to show your visitor how unpopular you are! Secondly, "hits" are nothing more than hits to the server. Every time an image or page loads, your hit counter will increment. It means nothing! As you can see, back in September of 2004, I had 1059 "hits." Does that mean I had over a thousand visitors? Heck no! I had just 36 visits to my site by only 19 "unique" individuals. Not very impressive. But if I wanted to fool myself and think that hits meant anything, I might have been (falsely) encouraged! Nothing even began to happen for FOUR MONTHS! In January I got nearly ten times the visits (and visitors) that I did in December. My promotions finally started kicking in... a little. I am making this post on February 4th. You can see that I am on pace to increase my site's popularity by about 500% this month. Is that good? Well, yes and no. The percentage increase is great and with continued growth at that pace my website will be making money for me (maybe significant $) within 60 days. But here's the bad and challenging part. There are over 56 MILLION websites! The only ones that really make any money are those ranked by Alexa in the top 1-2%. That means that if your Alexa ranking number is greater than about 1,000,000, you ain't gonna make much (if any) money! And the MAGIC number to shoot for is UNDER 100,000. What's MY site's ranking? Despite all my hard work for the last five months, my current ranking (02/04/05) is a dismal 4,357,260. Am I discouraged? NO! It takes about 10,000 visitors a month to get into the top 5%. I am now up to about 100 visitors a day. Within 60 days I'll be at about 300 visitors a day. That equates to about 9000 visitors a month. Let's say I get an average 1% conversion rate (we'll talk more about that not-so-little detail in future posts), that's 90 sales a month. Let's say I make an average $10 per sale (your actual net profits will depend entirely on what you sell and the profit margin), that's $900 a month profit. Well, there's a mortgage payment! Would you like your web business to pay your mortgage every month beginning about 6-8 months from now? You can do it! More encouraging signs... It's important to note here that whether you are your own web host or have a service provider, you MUST have daily access to your site stats. Because sometimes it's the statistics other than your hits and visitor counts that really tell you if what you are doing is working. For instance, as far as VOLUME of traffic is concerned, I have a long long way to go. But here are some encouraging signs (other than the healthy percentage of traffic growth): Almost 7% of my visitors stay on my website for 15 minutes to over an hour. About 5% of my visitors add my page to their Favorites (that means they're coming back!). So what does that mean? Well, I'll get at least 2000 visitors to my site in February (remember, just last August I got 0). 100 of them will bookmark my site. That number will be 500 when I'm getting 10,000 visitors a month in April or May! The key... The key is to stick with it, MONITOR your results, and make adjustments as necessary to improve your rankings, traffic and conversions. In my next post here I'll show you what I am doing, what's working, what isn't, and why (assuming I can figure that out!). So, stay-tuned to the Building a Profitable Internet Business from Scratch Chronicles! Click here for updates! If this all sounds too complicated for you but you STILL want to be successful on the Internet, click here. Jack Hayford has been a professional network marketer and MLM consultant for over twelve years. © Jack Hayford 2004. All Rights Reserved.