Continue reading »]]> As another post in my series about my Google Ranking Monitoring Software. Over the last week or so I have extended this to include Alexa Ranking, Yahoo Back Links and Google Back links, I will be posting a new version very soon. However this work has got me thinking about how you monitor and judge the success of your site.

I guess the simple answer is the success of the site is reflected in how much it earns, however I like to look deeper than this. There is of course the age old methods of number of unique visitors, page views and how long each user was on your site, however I think that there are now other was in which, if not judge the success of a site, monitor its performance especially in the success of SEO.

As indicated above my software now monitors Google Page Rank and back links, Alexa rank and Yahoo Rank. I plan to add other search engine rank monitoring into the software such as MSN, Altavista and others, but also something that is of critical importance these days rankings and link backs on social networking sites.

This may present too much information at too finer a detail, however this is proving to be a little experiment for me. With this level of detail I am hoping to see effort I am putting in to a site on building its social networking presence for example. I am hoping that these efforts will be reflected in the results of my SEO monitoring software.

Eventually I would like to see if there is indeed a correlation between increases in these various results and the sites performance in its number of visitors and income. I would like to get to the situation where I can graph these results and prove either way if the efforts are worthwhile. My instinct tells me that yes, the effort will pay off right through the chain, in terms of increasing rankings right through to increased revenue.

Continue reading »]]> I currently have several projects marketing products from Amazon, indeed in the past this very blog has promoted books that I have read and recommend. with the recent success of Great Hampers, many of the sales are via Amazon, and looking back at the stats it seems that users are very interested in a specific line of products.

Those of you who have read my blog regularly will know I like to keep my fingers on what is happening to all my projects in real time. Indeed this is what I do, as a professional I am a Project manager.

Amazons Affiliate program frustrates this, their stats are not only delayed until next day, you do not know what commissions you have earned until the items have been shipped. Amazon claim that this is because buyers can cancel their item until it has been shipped, however this also applies to many other merchants, what is wrong with the unapproved/approved commissions system run by other networks and merchants.

At least then I can monitor the sales that I am generating in real time and tweak PPC and Adwords campaigns to suit. Not only this, if it turns out that there are any trends in buying patterns I and re-enforce the products in that line, by adding more of the same to my affiliate site or by adding more details and better copy to those winning products.

Don’t get me wrong, the Amazon associates program is well worth joining, it just frustrates the way i like to work.