Saturday, October 29, 2011

Friday, October 28, 2011

Southsidebusiness.com traffic already on the rise

The official launch of the new SouthSideBusiness.com was less than 3 weeks ago. But October has already beat the previous 12 months in terms of visitors, number of visits, pageviews per visit and total pageviews. I'll post actual data on Tuesday.

The stat you've probably heard the most is "hits". I could post a very impressive number for "hits" as well, but it doesn't tell you a whole lot. A "hit" is any request for any file. If you have a page with 3 sections and a total of 10 images, a single 30 second visit to your page could generate at least 13 "hits".

We're off to a great start. I expect to see traffic continue to grow. Among other things, the new set-up allows for meta-tags and meta-descriptions for all articles, images, even ads. That makes the whole site much more search engine friendly. In the previous set up, the pages were displayed as jpg images, meaning the text within the pages would not turn up in searches, yet we still drew pretty good traffic.

Have a great weekend everyone, and a safe and fun Halloween!

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

New site for SouthSideBusiness.com, new mission for the blog

As you may have heard, the South Side Business News has gone all digital. The final hard copy issue was released this week.

That means more timely posting of stories, announcements, events and information, as well as expanded reach. The new site for SouthSideBusiness.com means a new mission for the South Side Business Blog.

The blog will now serve as a place to post updates, insights and information about SouthSideBusiness.com, rather than a place for posting stories that fall between, now obsolete, deadlines.

For example, SouthSideBusiness.com is running a special on its rotating banner ads, through October 15th (October 31st for current South Side advertisers), of $60 for 6 months. We have tracking capability, which means we can tell you how many times your banner ad was displayed and how many times it was clicked on.

But the blog wont just be about promoting ad sales. I can clue you in on why you might have clicked on one of the "see more photos here" links within some of the news stories only to find "page not found" at the top of your browser window. Yours truly is using Picassa to house web albums connected to stories, and I neglected to make them public before linking to them. That issue has been resolved.

The number of right side banner ads will be limited to 10 spaces and 50 ads (50 ads will rotate within the 10 spots). Hit the refresh button while on-site and you'll see what I mean. We'll later be breaking the right side ads into three pricing tiers, upper, middle and lower, probably with prices ranging from $25/month for the top 3 and $15 for the lower 4. Notice the right side ads are always there, no matter where you go within the website.

The mission is still the same as always, promoting and spotlighting the local small business community, while providing them with an affordable advertising venue. The trick is to keep it simple, while still keeping it entertaining and informative.

I'm sure the site and the blog will continue to evolve as technology and America do, but we'll never lose sight of why we do what we do as we change the way we do it.