Financial Times

Climbing the eLadder: Tackling online directories
By Nilooka Dissanayake
Last week, in exploring how to establish a web presence for your business, we listed out some questions you need to ask the online directory before you pay and obtain a listing. Today, let us discuss some of these questions at length.

* How many unique visitors come to your site a month/week/day?
Some web promoters talk in terms of hits. "We get a million hits a day." And obviously you will imagine this is the number of visitors to this website, won't you? But that is not so.

According to Niranjan Megammana of eFusion and the Kaputa network, one of the most experienced web developers in Sri Lanka, the number of hits is a misleading criteria. "Hits," he explained when asked, "depend on the number of elements in each page the visitor goes to. If he visits a page with say 100 graphics and 10 other elements, this one visit by this one visitor will be registered as 110 hits."

So, the criteria to go by are the number of unique visitors rather than hits.
You can also get a better idea of the visitor behaviour at the site by asking about page views. Page views simply mean the number of pages in the website that each visitor on average went to. Think of the websites that you visit. How many pages do you visit in a site, at one go? Think of this and ask your web directory the right questions.

It is also interesting to find out how many new visitors come to a website. Because we started monitoring traffic to www.smallbusiness.lk recently, this is something I am keen on. It also helps me judge the effectiveness of my email marketing campaigns. I will be in a position to talk more authoritatively about this topic in the near future.

* What is the profile of the visitors?
This is necessary to establish whether your intended target market is visiting the website.

You can ask the directory for a visitor profile by country. How many from Sri Lanka? How many from others etc. If you have interest in specific markets, this will be useful. If you are trying to attract buyers from Japan, ask how many visitors come from Japan (based physically in Japan that is) to the site each month. For example, we have noted that approximately 10% of www.smallbusiness.lk site visitors right now are from the Middle East. As far as we are concerned, that safely translates to those people, mostly English-reading persons working in the Middle East who are planning to come back to Sri Lanka to start a business. And the emails we have received corroborate this evidence.

So, there will be other pieces of information that an intelligent web directory operator can provide to you. Ask and you shall be given.

However don't just depend on asking questions. Take time and do some research yourself. Pay this directory a visit online. See how the home page is. Does it attract you? Make you want to explore further? Does it invite you to go deep in (and effectively increase page views)? Will it attract your target market? What sort of features do they offer for this purpose?
And don't forget to see who else is listed there already.

You can also possibly ask for referees and find out how satisfied they are and what sort of response they have got.
There are also other questions that we need to address before making the decision to pay for a web directory listing. They are:
*Who are the closest competitors for this directory?

*What does the directory do to attract visitors?
*What features do they provide? We will discuss these at length next week.
What are your questions and concerns? Let us know so that we can share these with our readers and seek solutions together. You can contact us on ft@sundaytimes.wnl.lk.

The writer is the Managing Editor of Athwela Vyaparika Sangarawa (Athwela Business Journal), the only Sinhala management monthly targeting the small and medium enterprises, the Ezine Athwela Email Magazine and www.smallbusiness.lk, the bilingual small business website.

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