Ok, I'm done feeling sorry for myself. I've been following my personal website and the school website projects I'm conducting with google analytics.

Unless I'm not clicking on the correct report, I must admit to being a bit disappointed. I thought analytics would allow me to see exactly who was visiting my site and when. The only thing I've been able to see so far is how many hits I have. I've been researching all the other ways I can analyze and hopefully improve my site in order to please/convert visitors into customers. I must say, the "free shipping" proposal is not an unreasonable one. If a customer is ordering $100 or more in product from my website, I think paying $6.50 for them to receive their product is not a bad exchange, huh? So, thank you James, for bringing this to my attention. It doesn't always have to be about profit, I'm finding.

Right now, it's more about getting product in the hands of the public. This is the only way to truly spread the word. It's most important to have people touching, smelling and experiencing the products so they can talk about them, fall in love with them and want to have them in their life always.... ahhh, what a concept, eh?

In my interactive marketing course, this week, it was all about analyzing the data. The big question is, 'at what point in their web shopping experience did your website lose the customer or cause them to abandon the activity in which they were engaged?'

The other big question was, 'what is the efficacy behind using multiple channels to get the sale and how do you measure which channel was most effective?' This was a very intriguing presentation/discussion. In any sort of sales these days, any sort of physical experience with the product before the actual purchase would be a desired situation for the marketer/business owner, right? So why take away the most common/easiest way to experience (to a small degree) the product, which is normally in the catalog that is mailed out to the consumer on a regular basis?

It seemed as though some of my classmates felt that the catalog is a dying method of marketing. The instructors for the night shot that theory down, poste haste. I completely agree. I also felt that this phrase "the pass along" doesn't truly indicate the importance of that catalog landing in the hands of someone that it wasn't necessarily mailed to but... the person became a customer after seeing the catalog.

Case in point: One of my colleagues in the MLM business lives in Coral Springs, Fla. She had mailed out catalogs and even left some catalogs at her dentist's office. She received a call from a man who had found her catalog at a fast food restaurant and wanted to order the products for his wife. How cool is that? My colleague had no clue how her catalogue had made it to this area of town for he was much further away than it seemed reasonable for her catalog to travel based on the original location but, she didn't question it. She took the order, counted her blessings and continues (to this day) to spread her catalogs far and wide.

That just reinforces...you just never know who you will touch with those direct mail campaigns...you just never know. I'm still looking for an article so I'll be back. In the meantime, enjoy having a look at another of my websites. There's lots of healthy stuff on there ( I personally recommend Projoba Pollenburst- item # pj330 if for any reason you need to boost your energy levels naturally-it's made with green tea and flower pollen, ahhh)... www.youngevityonline.com/rhondae