Your Website Logs Can Make You A Ton Of Money - Read This

When you have a website online, you may want to keep track of how many people are visiting your site. cPanel offers several built-in statistic reports, and AWStats is one of the more popular programs.

Awstats is a basic site log analysis program that comes with most host accounts.

AWStats updates every 24 hours and also instantly when you click the Update now link. The statistics report gives details about the amount of people coming to your website and other information such as:

• Monthly history
• Days of month
• Days of week
• Hours
• Countries (top 25)
• Hosts (top 25)
• Authenticated users (top 10)
• Robots/Spiders visitors (top 25)
• Visits duration
• Files types
• Pages-URL (top 25)
• Operating systems (top 10)
• Browsers (top 10)
• Connect to site from
• Search key phrases (top 10)
• Search keywords (top 25)
• HTTP error codes

How to access AWStats?

Log into cPanel.

In the Metrics section, click the AWStats icon.

Click the View icon next to the domain name for which you wish to view stats.

Activate Web Statistics in WHM

VPS and Dedicated Server owners may need to activate web statistics in WHM. To do this:

Log into WHM.

Go to Server Configuration > Statistics Software Configuration.

Adjust the settings and save

The FUN part of AWstats!

Being a busy lady with so many responsibilities I own several traditional brick-and-mortar businesses, and I spend a lot of time online. Since last month I’ve been spending a lot of time working on a new blog that I planned to go all the way with and show people the easiest way to make money and maximize profit.
So every morning I let my dogs out, grab a cup of coffee and toast a bagel, then run upstairs and get on my computer. Some days I need to be out of the house at 9:00 AM to get somewhere, and some days I have nothing but time. Either way, there are three things I do every morning after looking over my emails. First I go and post an article to five different article sites. This ensures that a steady stream of new one-way links to this website is being produced.

Then I go to my RSS reader and poke around for a while on the forums and blogs to see what is going on. I keep a notebook next to my computer and write down anything that I think I can use later. Then I get to the most interesting and important part of the morning I go to my AWStats page.

I’ve always wondered how accurate the hit counts and other numbers are, but that doesn’t matter because I’m not looking for counts or clicks, I’m looking for trends and what to work with, something that can help me improve and serve my audience better!

Reviewing and understanding your site traffic logs can help you make more money by tailoring your site to meet the needs of your visitors.

The first place I check is my average page counts by day of the week. I've noticed on some of my affiliate websites that the traffic starts strong on Monday, builds through Wednesday, then starts to trail Off, There's a small spike Saturday morning, but it's a classic bell curve otherwise. What does this mean? It means that if I have something that I think is going to be well received I try to publish it on Sunday and get my pinging done for Monday I've also noticed that the RSS feeds I subscribed to follows the same pattern. This all makes sense because people start the week strong and end it tired including me.

I breeze by the countries and note the flags because I think want to know how am doing in each country and where it seems my traffic is coming from, I try to see what they were looking at, which gives me an idea of my next article and what to do to improve and keep customers. Next, I stop at the section that shows the robots visiting the site. I make sure all of them have been there recently (especially Google), and I make a note if it looks like something is not right. I recently realized that one of the minor robots had never visited, so I went to the site and submitted a listing. You're curious about all the robots out there, go to Robotstxt.com and take a look.

This article was adapted from: HustlePapa.Com |Blogging, Internet Marketing and SEO Discussion Forum

Make sure the major robots on the list have visited your site in the last month. If not, you need to get them. I have noticed that MSN, Yahoo, and Google (in that order) visit my site the most. You need regular robot visits to ensure your latest content is indexed and available to prospective visitors.

Now we getting the idea of how to use your site logs right? The next to check is the list of the most-viewed pages. This tells you which content people are most interested in, and which content making the grade.

I get some search engine traffic but not much, so I glance at the keywords. Judging by some of the keywords that appear there, this section isn’t very accurate.

Still there? Okay, listen up. Here’s where you can multiply your traffic, find some compatriots to work with, and get some terrific insights into the minds of your visitors, Remember that content is king always. Move down to the section that shows the external websites that people are coming from. Understand this is where your visitors saw something about you and clicked on it.

Go through this entire list. I look for blog sites, websites, social bookmarking sites (like del.icio.us), and forums that have not appeared before or have moved up fast. I click on the link and see where it leads. Then I see the context in which my website appears.

Just as I do for people who track back my blog (refer to it in their blog), I follow each link, get an email address and send off a quick email to the person thanking them for taking the time to mention my site. Nothing fancy just a quick thanks is fine.

The responses I get back are terrific. I would say that a large majority of them (80% probably) are responded with amazement that I would take the time to acknowledge their actions. But why wouldn't I? If someone takes the time to recommend you the least you can do is acknowledge that recommendation and be grateful for it.

I love the site list because I find out some really interesting things. For example, my trackback to Google's blog when they bought Writely was listed on the Google blog page and brought me some traffic. And I was on the front page of del.icio.us for a little while long enough to get some hits that way too. It's interesting, and it's fun to go through.

One last observation noticed that the people bookmarking my page hovers between 7 – 10%, which isn't bad. My RSS feed list at Feedburner hovers at about the same range throughout the month, meaning that more people bookmark the site than sign up for RSS feeds. I've pondered this all month, and I've decided that a large majority of my visitors don't use RSS regularly. That's why the new crimson box at the top of my blog pages has appeared today. I put together an email version of my RSS feed in digest form that I'm going to make available weekly.

So there's a ton of information out there in that log file you just need to go over it carefully and think.

Note: Statistics are not accessible on a Shared or Reseller cPanel with more than 100 domain entries, including subdomains, addon domains, and parked domains. If you have a lot of websites in a single cPanel, we recommend using Google Analytics, or another third-party statistics solution as an alternative.

Do you find this helpful? Please feel free to ask me any questions and I’ll do my best to give an honest and best answer. Thanks

This article was adapted from: HustlePapa.Com |Blogging, Internet Marketing and SEO Discussion Forum