Our Journey into Internet Marketing

It’s always nice to know whether your efforts work out.  Is your website worth anything?   Of course,  you won’t know  until you try to sell it for real,  but there are ways to get an indication.  For example use one of these services:

• CubeStat - doesn’t look that good, but the results are the most accurate
• PeekStats - has some nice graphs and other statistics, worth is slightly overestimated
• DoLoop - more a site statistics tool, but they have worth as well

All these services only mean something if  you have an advertising based business model targeting mostly US visitors.   If you don’t   it’s better to just go to any of the websites where they sell websites on and find the one that is most similar to yours, both in traffic, audience and revenue.

Not like I promised a post about our future plans, but something more about the current state of our internet marketing and yours as well.  If you are not much into marketing like us, a good start is to at least know how bad things are for your site.   There are several indicators for how well you are doing at this moment.  Things like Google Pagerank, Alexa Rank, Number of indexed pages in Google, etc.

To check all these statistics for your site someone has developed a nice tool of which we are hosting an improved version at  www.xinureturns.com.  An other nice tool to use are the Google Webmaster Tools. It shows you much info about links to your site, keywords, errors during crawling your site, etc.   You can even set some preferences and ask for removal or reinclusion of certain content from the index.

To get more statistics about actual visitors and referrals  we use Google Analytics, which seems to be widely regarded as the best free package available at this moment.

We love to think about new web applications and even implement them. However, until now we are not very successful in convincing users to come to our sites and use them. In this weblog we will try to keep you up to date about our efforts to make our existing and new products more successful.   At this moment we don’t know whether our products just suck (we don’t think so), or is it our (lack of an) approach  to the market.  Either way, we need to find out soon.

What we will do is post here at least once a week about our efforts in the area of online marketing in it’s broadest sense.   In my next post I will tell something about our products and the marketing efforts we did in the past year.