The Site Made a Sale

I was looking through my Commission Junction stats for yesterday and noticed that the Pressbook Collector site had its first sale. I'm not sure where it came from though because I failed to add any kind of hit counter to the page. That's either a sign of encroaching senility or of having too many irons in the fire!

The Commission Junction stats show that it's had fourteen clicks through to eBay and the one sale. Even more encouraging is that the sale was for a pressbook:

Ok, so the commission was only $0.83 on this one item, but since I haven't done any SEO work on the site yet, it should give an indication of just how powerful BANS can be. Someone was probably searching for Pressbooks in a search engine, found the site, clicked one of the items, and bought something.

Since I forgot to add a hit counter to the site, we'll never know for sure. I'm going to remedy that right now though. If this is all old hat, just skip the rest of the post; for the rest of you, I'll show how I set it up.

I use Statcounter for all of my hit tracking. Some people prefer the high-level analysis that you can do with Google Analytics, but I like the granularity Statcounter provides. Heck, they're both free, so I suppose you could put both on the same site. Since adding them to your sites works the same way for both, I'll just walk through one here. Again, I'll assume that you're using a BANS site (since that's the gist of this thread).

First, set up a free account at Statcounter if you don't have one already. Once your account is set up and you have logged in, click the "Add New Project" link on the main page:

Fill out the name of your web site, its address, then choose a category and timezone and click "Next." Congratulations! Your project has been created! OK, so you still need to configure it and get the code (I don't know why they get so excited at this point). Click the "Configure & Install Code" arrow to move to the next step. I almost always choose an invisible counter, but you can use your judgment here. Just choose one of the display options and click next again.

It will ask you where you want to install the code to help you make it a bit easier. Just choose the option that says "No, I want the default install guide" and click "Next" again.

Now here comes the fun part. You'll see a bunch of code in the middle of the screen:

If you click inside of the box, it will highlight all of the code for you. Then copy the code to your clipboard (steps 1 and 2 below the box of code tell you how to do this if you don't know how). Now you need to insert it into your page.


Switch over to your BANS admin page (log in if you need to), and click on the "Template" link on the left menu. Once that loads, choose the "footer.php" link for your chosen template (see 1 and 2 below):
Now it gets really ugly! Not really. This is pretty easy. Inside of the code window, scroll all of the way to the bottom and find the last two lines that look like this:

</body>
</html>

Click in front of the "<" on the "</body>" line (use your arrow keys if you aren't sure that you're in the right place), then paste in the code you copied on the Statcounter site. If you don't know how to do this, hold down the control key on your keyboard and type the letter "v" (if you're a Mac user, you're on your own since I don't know the keystrokes). Then make sure to click the "Update Footer" button at the bottom of the page:
That's all there is to it. As you get visitors to your page, you'll see them show up on the Statcounter site. Their free service only saves 500 visitors per site, but I've found that it's enough to get a good understanding of traffic patters of your visitors.

On another note, I'm taking a few days off from work over the weekend, so I'm going to try to finish up the pressbook site. It's very close already, but I'm not satisfied with the page colors. Then I'll start some SEO work to see if we can start getting some real traffic.

Till next time.