Website Market Worksheet
A worksheet for planning traffic growth
Best Practices – How to Increase Website Traffic
In the spirit of “Your Website is a Business” we have compiled a list of the best resources we could find on subject of practical ways to increase traffic covered in the article Website Market Positioning. Here is a worksheet you can use to learn about your website environment. You will also find a list of links to websites that provide insight to these issues.
A worksheet for planning traffic growth
This article is part of the series Change Creates Growth. This article addresses our goal to provide practicle tips for increasing traffic in current internet conditions.
The worksheet below is made up of questions. The answers will help you develop a roadmap for planning your website and business growth.
Ask questions: the answers will provide direction
There are two sets of questions. The first set is about your website environment, the second is about your website.
1) visitor data and statistics for your website and
2) for your market sector on the internet.
These are two separate sets of information. Learn about your field or market, and the competition. How does your website fit in to your market sector? How do you stack up to the competition?
Part one: understanding your website environment
An analysis of your environment will help you plan, for example tell you where to advertise; go where people are. Ask why people are going to the places they go and determine if there is overlap with what your website does.
- Where is my target audience? Where are people going – how do they use the internet?
Click here to read: Why you need to meet your target audience where they are. - Anticipate. What changes are taking place; if you know where traffic is now, and was a year ago, where will it be next year?
Click here to read: Global CEO study: The enterprise of the future.
Click here to read: Small business of the future. - Market conditions. How is your business affected by changing conditions – market getting bigger or smaller, more or less competition. Is Google entering your field?
Click here to see: Alexa the web information company.
Click here to see: Yahoo! Alerts. - Compare to Competition. How do you stack up to your peers and competition- do you need to change in order to compete or survive?
Click here to read: Tools for keeping track of competition. - Are you positioning yourself into the right market or environment?
Click here to read: How to position yourself in the marketplace. - Innovate. How can you utilise Web 2.0 for your data-collection and action strategies. Can you improve your strategy by updating your site to Web 2.0?
Click here to read: Why you should let Web 2.0 into your heart.
Part two: understanding your website target audience
Incorporate information about your website environment into your site strategy. Use statistics to determine if your efforts are working. The process is ongoing and continuous. The questions will not change over time although the answers will change as destinations change on the internet. These are questions that you should ask on a regular basis. We recommend to visit these issues at monthly production meetings. You will need to use opentracker or another tracking and statistics package to answer these questions with real data.
