Before you even try go get some traffic there is one thing that needs to be done, you need to have some way to meassure what results you get from your actions. This is really important, you need to know who you attract so that you can calibrate your efforts to get the maximum effect.

To do that i prefer to use a free service from Google that is called Google Analytics, this tool has all the features you would need as a beginner or even advanced user. If you havent used these kind of tools before it can be a bit overwhelming at first, but to start with you only need to know about a few of the features that is available.

Implementing Google Analytics

To start with you need to register an account to be able to access the service.

When this is done and you have logged in, you need to create a profile for your website. You can find a step by step guide at bottom that says Add Website Profile, use this.

At the end of the guide you get a tracking code, that you need to insert into your website. It should go right before the </body> tag on every webpage you want to track. If you are using wordpress then you will probably find the </body> tag in the file called footer.php.

When this is done you press finish and wait for Analytics to confirm that your code is correctly installed. It can take a few hours before it updates. From now on i will refer to visitors as customers, because thats what they are.

Inside Google Analytics

To begin with i only think that you need to focus on the Dashboard that you see when you use the View Report link. A the top you have a graph that says Visits, this one indicates how many pageviews you have, this tells you how many pages your visitors browse through during their visit.

Further down you have a graph that says Visitors, this one indicates how many unique vistors you have. When we try out our different marketing techniques this one will tell if we hit anyone, combined with the visits graph we can tell how many pages the average customer browses during a certain timespan.

On top of this we have the list that says Content Overview to tell us exactly what pages our customers find most interesting and Traffic Source Overview that tells us from where the customer came, Direct Traffic indicates that the customer typed your sitename into the browser, Reffering Sites indicates that the customer followed a link from someones website and Search Engines tells us that someone was using one of the many search engines to find you.

This is all you need to know to get started, keep an eye on the graphs.

If you want more specific information/tips about any of the features please let me know.