Administrative Operations
A page explaining the administrative tasks required to run a web site.
Renew domain name and hosting package
Renewing a domain name and hosting is not something you have to do on an ongoing basis but there are still steps you will want to take to insure nothing will go wrong. For domain names you will want to make sure your domain company has the correct contact information, especially your e-mail address because you'll want to make sure you get the reminder emails they send out before your names expire. If you can, set your important domains to auto-renew. For hosting, you will want to set up your account to auto re-new also so that your hosting package gets automatically billed when it expires.
Check web stats
Checking web stats is something all webmasters do because they get a lot of information about the popularity and relevancy of their different pages. On a once-a-week basis you'll want to look at:
 | Daily visitors - This tells you how many people come to your site. This is one of the most important numbers and you'll want to see gradual improvement in this number. |
| Daily page views - This tells you the total number of pages viewed by all your visitors. This number is a jsut as important as the number of vistors because it takes into consideration how many people are coming to your site as wellas how much content they are viewing. |
| Most popular incoming links - This will show what pages are linking to your site. This tells you how naturally interested other people are in your site as well as gives you insight into what people are saying about your site. |
| Most popular search terms - This is one of the most important stats. It shows what search terms are bringing in the most traffic. If your marketing plan is SEO-based then this information is vital to measuring the success of your marketing. |
The things you'll want to look at about once a month are:
| Page views per user - You get this number by dividing the number of page views by the number of visitors. This shows you how many pages the average visitor is looking at. Ideally, this number should gradually be increasing because, as a good webmaster, you'll be constantly adding new content as you'll want your users to be looking at additional parts of your site. |
| Most popular pages on your site - This will show what pages of the site are most popular. This is important in guaging whether you were right or wrong when it came to creating different content sections of your site and estimateing their popularity. |
| Browsers - You'll want to see what the msot popular browsers are (probably IE and Firefox) and you'll want to make sure your site comes up correctly in those browsers. |
| Bots - You'll want to know what bots are on your page so that you can block any ones you don'twant. |
| Visitors IP addresses - You'll want to make sure you don't have too much traffic from 1 particular IP address because this could mean someone is stealing your content. Most webmasters are always working and checking their sites so your IP should be the most active one on the list. If it isn't then something may be wrong. |
| Links from external pages that have hits but no pageviews - If you find sites that are linking to your site but are producing no pages views then this means people could be hotlinking your images. There are simple scripts that can prevent anyone from hotlinking your images. Sometimes I actually prefer to not use these scripts because people who hotlink your pics sometimes will do it because they copied your content as well as the picture. Letting people hotlink your pics sometimes is a good way of seeing who is stealing your content. Most people like to point out that they are also stealing your bandwidth but bandwidth costs are so low these days that the extra bandwdith probably won't make a difference - but this is up to you. |
| Top Entry Pages - You'll want to see what pages visitors are entering your site through. Most times, your index page will always be first but the ones after that are noteworthy. |
| Top Exit Pages - You'll want to see which pages your visitors are leaving your site from. |
| Search Engine Referrals - You'll want to see how many clicks you are getting from each big search engine. If you are getting 10 times as much traffic through Google as you do Yahoo (which will likely be the case) then that will tell you that your SEO campaign should be geared towards making Google happy. |
| Source of traffic - Your traffic will come from 3 main sources - direct traffic (type-in and bookmark traffic). Search engine links (from search terms) and external links (from other pages). You'll want to check to see what your strengths and weaknesses are. You will want to check the ratio of direct traffic, search engine, and external traffic as a percent of total traffic and possibly track it monthly. The more popular your site gets, the more direct traffic you will get. |
| Bandwidth and hits - You will want to check this as your site gets more popular just to make sure you aren't going over your limits and also to make sure your bandwidth number isn't showing some insane number which could mean someone is stealing your bandwidth. |
Marketing Performance
If you run PPC campaigns then monitor what your cost-per-click, revenue-per-click, and profits-per-click are. If you use many differnet affiliate programs then monitor which programs are generating the most click-throughs, sign-ups, profits, profits per user, profit per click, etc.
E-mail
Once your site becomes popular you will be spending so much time dealing with e-mail that it can become a full-time job if you let it. You will be dealing with: questions and compaints from site visitors, special offers or issues from your affiliate programs if they screw up payments, hundreds of e-mails a year asking for link exchanges, emails to/from other webmasters, people asking to buy your site for an insulting small amount, and many other issues. You need to prioritise your time and make sure you don't get caught up talking to people who are going to waste your time.
Processing Money
You will have to spend time processing payments to you. This can take a considerable amount of time if you make money through many affiliate programs. It is not uncommon for some web sites to have 50-100 affiliate programs. It can be especially aggravating when programs miss your payment, underpay you, or go out of business.
