Hits or Views - The Difference

Understanding the Differences

You have just built a killer website, and now it is time to promote it. How? Where do you turn? There are several means of gaining traffic, and about a million ebooks and articles about it.

My article will focus mainly on hits and views, and how to tell the difference. It will also give you ideas where to find each, and what their purpose is, in relation to your website.

Everyone has probably heard by now, one of the ways to climb up in the engines is hits. Ok, you can get hits. Hits are easy to come by. You can join auto surfs that surf a 1:1 ratio every 5 seconds, meaning for every site you view, you get a credit, credit = hit. It means someone else is suppose to view your site. But honestly, can a person tell if they want your service or product in 5 seconds? I do not believe they can. So what is the solution? Let’s dig a little deeper.

If you just want numbers, join the fast surfs, grab a million credits, assign them all and you will get numbers. Numbers are a good thing, as far as ranking companies are concerned. These companies meaning such as Alexa, or Ranking.com which determine their rank of your website by the amount of traffic and unique visitors you have. So, give these fast surfs an hour of your day. Get your numbers up.

Ok, I have hits, what about views?

Google and other search engines would rather have quality content. They will search your entire site, crawling for links, and content. No, I do not mean put a million links on your site either. They won’t even acknowledge it as a website. Not enough, too many, it is hard to know sometimes. All you can do is study their guidelines, which by the way, seem to change on a constant basis.

I can tell you from experience, the search engines LOVE blogs and forums. My own forum is crawled several times a day, by various search engines. Why? It is ever changing content that arouses their curiosity. There is something fresh added on a regular, usually daily basis. Also, you have people from all over the internet, giving advice, lending a helping hand, adding quotes and funnies. They do a lot of the original work for you. You do not have to work day and night, trying to come up with ideas of things to write about.

Now, IF you use a blog or a forum, you are only extending your advertising for FREE! Many people now use only the two as their main source of advertising. There are literally hundreds if not thousands of them online now. Most will let you add your URL in your signature line; some will let you blatantly promote your product or service. Be sure to check the rules of each before you post though, as you do not want to be banned from using their service.

The people, who click on your link from such places as described in the last three paragraphs, are LOOKING at your site. They are potential paying customers. Did you hear that? They are POTENTIAL PAYING CUSTOMERS! Say that to your self over and over again, until you fully understand what that really means.

Think about it, these very same people came to the same place you did, to promote their own products and services. They saw your link, read your ad, whatever the case may be something has drawn them to YOUR website. Now that they are there, DO NOT let them get away! Give them a reason to want to stay, to consider buying what you offer. Make the site appealing to the eye and the product or service you offer sound as though they have to have it to survive. If you do, I promise you, they will come back time and again.

It is a proven fact that people on the average, have to see an item or service up to seven times before making a decision to invest.

You are saying to yourself, “Hmmmm, I thought we were talking about surfs earlier?” Yes we were, and I am not through with them. You can gain some quality traffic online by using manual surfs. Why? The reasoning is, if you pick and choose correctly, people will have to stare at your ad for a minimum of thirty seconds to one minute.

Depending on the size of the surfs membership, you may have 10000 people looking at your ad once a day or you may have 500 seeing it several times a day. Either way, it is NOT a bad thing! They MUST stare at your ad, the allotted amount of time in order to earn the credit it takes for their ad to be viewed. So you see, it is a winning situation for you!

Now you know how to grab quality views of your site. Last month, I had a total of 5186 unique visitors to visit my website. Remember, I said UNIQUE! These same people viewed different areas of my site and kept coming back until I had 272927 hits during the month of July. Now, let’s break it down a bit further.

The number of people that stayed at my site and for how long is:

• 1 - 30 seconds 8419

• 30 seconds to 2minutes 458

• 2 minutes to 5 minutes 413

• 5 minutes to 15 minutes 792

• 15 minutes to 30 minutes 796

• 30 minutes to 1 hour 1195

• 1 hour + 936

• If you average the time that each stayed, it comes to 645 seconds. That’s not bad.

• The number of people that actually added my site to their favorites 297

That means 297 people plan to come back and visit my site and it means they may come back more than once or twice. They know, we add new content everyday. It may be new items to the store, it may be new freebies to the free page, it may be new posts in the forum, but something will change in that 24 hour period, and they want to know what it will be.

Now my numbers are extremely small for an online business, but, it is because I just started advertising it 3 months ago! I had the site for 2 years and just started advertising it. I was not sure what I wanted to do with it, and I did not want to advertise it until I knew there was something there to catch someone's eye. Some people can accomplish the same thing in one day, by building a quick website, but for me, it has to be just right. It is doubling all the time! I can not ask for more than that. I have a great growth rate. I do not mind if it takes a while to get the word to the masses. I have plenty of time.

There are many additional ways to achieve web traffic, and I will discuss this more in future articles.

Now, you know my story. It did not happen over night, and it is not where I want to be, but I think I have a fair start going on.

by Robin King