Web Marketing Strategy Update

I’ve been using the free Awstats web analytics software for years on many of my domains (I use Google Analytics on some as well now, but the advantage of Awstats is its single page format, giving instant access to the data without lot’s of clicking about).

The other day, I decided my Awstats installation was overdue an update and popped over to SourceForge to pick up the latest version.

While I was looking over the docs to refresh my memory on the upgrade process, I came across a link to a page of Awstats ExtraSection examples on another website.

Awstats ExtraSections enable you to create your own special reports not provided by default with AWStats. I personally only started putting them in my domain configuration files a few years ago, and then only as a means of tracking clicks on exit and redirect links, etc.

It seemed much easier than having separate scripts to track clicks on my affiliate links, for example.

The AWStats Enhancements and Extensions page covers quite a bit more than that though, and provides copy and paste examples of the code to add.

Squidoo is the brain child of popular and latterly philanthropic marketer Seth Godin, who’s also the author of a small pile of marketing books containing some pretty revolutionary thinking.

The idea is that anyone can set up a “Lens” on any topic they choose, sharing information for the purposes of building reputation, drawing traffic to other websites, making money or just for fun.

Simply a web page with a hip new name, besides giving you space to write on your subject of choice, a lens has modules to optionally add stuff like RSS feeds, items from Amazon, polls, photos from Flickr, etc.

A lot of time has now passed, but if I remember correctly, the basic premise in setting up Squidoo was that search engines would never be able to deliver what people want, and that the people themselves would make a better job of it by voting with their feet as it were, from amongst Lenses created by others knowledgeable on a subject.

Here’s the Oct 2005 post on Seth’s blog with the free ebook download introducing Squidoo and explaining the concept of “everyone’s an expert.”