Part 3 : Successes and failures

What proved to be the most successful traffic-building techniques?
First, let me mention techniques that require time, not money. The single most successful approach for increasing visitors was to add fun to the site. We started by offering guides to all manner of helpful dog information, but when we added the Best Dog FREE STUFF! and Comic Canine Cartoons pages, we gained a very nice boost in traffic to those pages every day, month in and month out. The related strategy is to entice people visiting these fun pages to visit other sections of the site or to shop while they are there. The fundamental meaning of marketing is to please your customers, and this did it very successfully.

We also added Canine Link of the Week, a feature on the home page that as you'd expect changes every week. This gives freshness to the site and a reason to return. We now announce the new topic in our weekly newsletter along with a new freebie added to Best Dog FREE STUFF! and new winners of Cool Canine Site Award, another traffic builder.

For a site like WorkingDogWeb.com, a family-friendly site, getting listed on dog lovers' "favorite links" pages at their websites is very valuable. And nothing beats a listing at Yahoo! for free traffic.

Second, let me mention the only advertising program that we pay for -- paying for clickthroughs on keyword searches at GoTo.com. You pay only for the visitors you get, those responding to terms related to your products or free traffic-building services. You can control your expenses by adding or dropping terms or changing the amount you'll pay per click. For a small e-commerce site, it is a great traffic builder with built-in accountability.

Did you make any moves early on that you now regret?
I really have no regrets, because the site grew along with the development of the Web and my own skills and knowledge, gaining new content and services as they become available. I do wish I had started an e-mail newsletter earlier than I did, however. That is a valuable way to build community, loyalty and return visitors, and I should have seen that much earlier. Today, WDW News subscriber numbers are growing rapidly and I hope to triple the readership before the next holiday shopping season.

There is one real irony to the progress of the site, however. I envisioned at the beginning having six guides to dog information, a bookstore and a book review section. But instead of spending time reviewing books, I soon realized I had to spend my time building traffic or no one would be reading the reviews. So I've spent my time on content, content, content! Today I am finally into the phase of developing the dog book review section of the site. In fact, I was chosen recently to review the new book, Yukon Alone, about the Yukon Quest sled dog race and to interview John Balzar, the award-winning author. I am confident that is was the rich content of WorkingDogWeb.com that led the publicity agent for the book to offer me the opportunity.

I now have other dog book authors sending me review copies, and I expect this part of the site to expand significantly, in turn helping with books sales.

Once you had WorkingDogWeb up and running, how quickly did you achieve your objectives? Have you achieved your objectives?
Our first objective -- reaching out to people interested in all kinds of activities with their dogs plus dog breeds, health, puppies and more -- began to be achieved from the start. My objective of learning about Web page design, site development and marketing has been realized, but I also know it will never be "achieved" because the Web will continue to grow and change, presenting more to learn. The e-commerce goal only began to come in to its own in a significant way in the summer of 1999. At that point, the site had a breadth of content developed over two years, had links to it on other dog sites around the world, and two important marketing strategies -- Canine Link of the Week and GoTo.com advertising -- were launched. Traffic and shopping both increased and we experienced the best holiday shopping season in our short history through several affiliate programs.

What "problems" or "difficulties" have you encountered along the way?
The most serious problem occurred two years ago, when hackers crashed the ISP's servers. To my dismay, the ISP staff was using a simple back-up system right on its online servers, so the back-up copies were damaged as well. And I was not maintaining back-ups because I was sure they were doing a professional maintenance job. Oops!

Fortunately, the ISP sent all their server storage devices off to a specialist who was able to retrieve most of the site, but a version a few weeks old in content upgrades. Naturally I now have back-up copies of all my pages, the ISP keeps offline back-ups and there've been no further crashes.

Do you track your visitors? How?
Absolutely. Remember my insistence that your audience must be your No. 1 priority? If you don't track what's happening on your site, you don't know what works, what your visitors enjoy and what you should develop further.

One valuable tracking tool is built into the deluxe account of the Link Exchange banner exchange service, now actually called the Microsoft bCentral Banner Exchange. You get counts for each page carrying one of the banners. You quickly see what pages are the most popular. You must have a means to measure page popularity and this is a convenient one.

I also used the Pagecount.com program that combined a visible counter, a guest book and an excellent array of data available only to the webmaster. When it was bought out by Xoom.com, the amount of advertising increased on the Pagecount banner, and one day a visitor said he say an x-rated banner on the Xoom.com display space. I wrote to Xoom.com to complain, got no answer and decided to switch to another service. I could not afford to offend parents visiting the site with their kids. Actually I began using two: Extreme-dm.com and Counted.com. You certainly could use just one of them, but each offers a bit different information so I will continue with both of them.

Were you surprised by visitor patterns? How has understanding visitor behavior helped you develop and improve the site?
Surprised? Sure. The Best Dog FREE STUFF! page drew many, many visitors, more than the home page. The Dog Breeds page was really popular, more than the Dog Training page. And so on. I redid the banner ad for the free banner exchange program to highlight our most popular services, and that helped build traffic further. And that in turn helped me develop the strategy for the e-zine. And so on. You can see that I have used an evolutionary process to site development, watching what works and using the new insights to further improve the site.