Online Marketing Tools
Here’s some of the tools I’m using to help me with the online marketing for Fab Swingers.
I’m tracking visitors to the site with Google Analytics and AWStats. Google Analytics uses cookies and JavaScript to track visitors while AWStats uses log file analysis. Neither method is perfect but the combination of the two works pretty well. Incidentally, you really should use the GeoIP plugin if you want accurate details of where visitors are coming from (and as a bonus it will also run a bit faster too).
Google Sitemaps and Yahoo Site Explorer are both great ways of communicating with the search engines. You can upload details of your site and you can make sure that everything is being indexed correctly.
It’s really useful to know what terms people are searching for. The Keyword Selector Tool will tell you. You’ll need to multiple the answers you get by 5 to get an approximation of all of the searches going on.
It can be hard to understand the context of searches; for example are people looking for “swingers” because they want to try group sex or because they are interested in the movie by the same name? Microsoft’s Search Funnel is a great tool for understanding what searchers are really looking for.
Finally to measure your progress and compare yourself with your competitors, the Google Toolbar will give you the PageRank of the sites you visit. The toolbar is only updated every 3 months or so won’t see changes very frequently even though you should be making progress. Alexa will give you traffic rankings, I’ve not found this tool fantastically accurate but it’s interesting.