Many of you may have heard about blogs. Short for Web Log, a blog is an online diary that captures important opinions, valuable articles or very bizarre ruminations. Blogs can be kept by anyone, from CEO’s, MP’s, School Principals or just people with interesting lives - if someone might read it, there’s a person’s blog to cater for it. The beauty of blogs is that they provide very specific information, be it subjective, on millions of different topics.

And what topic could be more important than your business. Let’s look at a few examples of how blogs could be used to great effect in your business:

Example 1, for medium to large businesses: The blog has become a valuable tool for CEO’s to keep an open line to their entire organisation. Previously, many employees may have complained about not knowing what the future direction was of the company they worked for; that an annual address at the AGM or Christmas Party just didn’t cut it. Now a weekly entry by the CEO to his or her blog that has its link to sent to staff keeps those employees feeling that the old "silo" effect is a thing of the past. Government departments, medical institutions and the education sector are particularly good examples of this.

Example 2, for small businesses: One of the hardest aspects of developing a small business is building credibility. Granted, you can spend 5 years developing a client  list that helps spread the word about your products and services. Or you can position yourself as an expert  in your field NOW by writing regular articles about your area of expertise in your blog. Are there competitors who know more about your industry? Maybe. But how many of them promote that expertise beyond their annual catalogue or a 3 inch ad in the local paper? Not many.

And who will subscribe to this blog, you ask? The same customers who provide their email addresses to you via your contact us page on your website, that goldmine of leads that may not buy from you this month, or next month, but maybe the month after that, or at the very least, tell their friends about you.

Have you ever noticed a company’s logo appearing next to their web address in your browser’s address window, like this Qantas example? Usually, your browser’s default symbol would appear (e.g. the Internet Explorer ‘e’), but it can be customised to a company’s logo, something that we in the web industry call a "favicon" (short for "favourite icon"). Look through your own favourites list and you will probably notice that the companies that have used favicons are usually pretty prominent companies including banks, airlines and established internet brands like Amazon and Ebay.

Favicons are a cheap and easy way to start pushing your brand, no matter how far into its infancy it may be. If somebody said to you that they were going to place your company’s logo in a spot where potential customers visit nearly every day, you would probably leap at the chance, especially if they said the cost was virtually nothing.

To make matters even more relevant, with the release of Google Notebooks last year (a service that allows Google users to keep their favourites online so they can access them anywhere), it’s becoming increasingly apparent that search engines may start to rank websites in the future based on what visitors deem important enough to bookmark.

When I first approach a new client about their online needs, one of the first questions I always ask is, "Are you getting a lot of new customers out of your existing website?" The answer I usually receive ranges from "Not a lot " through to "Customers? What customers?"

But when I follow this up with "How do you measure your online traffic?" the answer to this is nearly always the same - "I don’t know."

80% of all businesses we meet with receive no regular statistics about their website at all. Of the remaining 20%, half check their statistics every couple of months.

Can you imagine not paying attention to the returns of your investment in any other form of advertising? If you advertise in the local paper, or rent out a billboard on  the Westgate Freeway, you would want to see that outlay met with a serious influx of customers.

The reason businesses may not tend to be as diligent when it comes to tracking their website leads is that a website is built with an estimated lifespan of 2-3 years. Once the initial expense has been incurred, we may pay attention to the site for the first few months, but by year 2 our interest could very easily have waned.

So how do you find out if your website is really pulling its weight, and how can you fix it if it’s not?

1. Access your site’s free statistics today. Hell, do it now! And then do it at least once a month. If you don’t know how, call your hosting company and have them explain it to you. For Stockstreet Hosting customers, go to www.yourdomain.com.au/cpanel and enter your user name and password, then click on "Web/FTP stats". Webalizer is the best choice for stats.
2. Ask your customers. This may sound a bit obvious, but do you or your reception ask every new customer how they heard about your business? This can also be a good time to get feedback about the site, so that the next time it comes for a revamp, you’ll be one step ahead of your competition.
3. Use your site to measure other advertising. The first week you launch that new radio or magazine campaign, pay as much attention to your web statistics as you do to answering the telephone. Also, is your website advertised on every surface available to your business including your invoices? Remember, a website address is ten times easier to remember than a phone number.
4. Run a special online. Let’ face it, all the traffic in the world won’t make you a millionaire if the look and layout of your website can’t close the deal. But a big discount offered to "web customers only" has been known to make the average customer a lot more forgiving.

   And if these four don’t paint a very rosy picture, then…

5. Get your site optimised. If your site did not receive Search Engine Optimisation at the time of construction, your site has missed out on probably the most critical aspect of online marketing - allowing customers to find you via the major search engines. There are varying degrees of Search Engine Optimisation, the most important being site-specific measures. All Stockstreet website clients would have received this service at the time of construction (unlike many of the sites built by our competitors), while maintenance clients can apply to have this service applied to existing sites by contacting Stockstreet.