Feeling the Love for your Website and Measuring it

So far in this web series we have discussed how to start your own website in “Initializing your Web Strategy” and how to integrate Magic Card images into your website in “Expanding your Website’s Horizons”. In this weeks article we will discuss how to generate traffic to your site and how to measure it.

Successfully generating traffic to your site is kind of like herding cats. You can spend a lot of time doing things that have no effect and then do one thing that blows your site off the map but without any way to measure the traffic on your site it, you won’t know what you did to do it again. Most hosting providers will provide you with free statistics software that analyzes the web server HTTP request logs to give you a web page where your visitors have come from, how many have visited and how long they spend on your site. I prefer to use the Google Analytics plugin for Wordpress which you can install and sync with your Google Account.

The basic theory behind attracting and retaining traffic to your site is to make your website interesting to Humans. The “Humans” qualifier is because you can make your website very interesting to web Bots which is typically called SEO or Search Engine Optimization. Although I won’t go into any details about SEO techniques, I do encourage you to educate yourself about SEO by visiting my favorite SEO site seomoz.org where they have tools to help you gauge your SEO effectiveness with the different search engines.

To make your site interesting to Humans, you’ll have to think like one. New, unique and changing content, easy to view and find information and a pleasing graphical design are all ways you can make your site more attractive to Humans. Things not to do might include excessive advertising or self promotion, preachy or ranting content and graphics designs with excessive elements like color, images, or sound. When you enjoy your site, your visitors will too.

So my advice is to prepare content for your site for a week in advance. Don’t worry about length or quantity, just write what you know and people will be interested. Whether you love sharing your decks or discussing the latest banned and restricted cards, don’t feel like you need to copy what others do to be successful. Some of the best websites are built by people with passion for what they do that opens dialog with others with the same passion. By sharing your passion with others, you’ll earn their trust which will ensure a group of loyal fans that will naturally help promote and bring others to your site.

Now that you know the basics of how to retain visitors to your site, next week I will explore a few case examples of ways to start attracting your new audience with a simple and inexpensive marketing plan.