4,000+ visitors to AdamCreighton.com in August!

There's a homily that goes something along the lines of "90% of acting is business; the rest is craft."

My Website is a key part of my business and marketing utility belt. I check traffic stats on a weekly basis to find out where people are going, how often my resume is viewed, how many clips are being downloaded, and so on.

I can see from where visitors are coming (from which domain), and I've used that to create opportunities for me. For example, after sending a press packet to a major game studio, I saw from my Web logs that someone from the company had gone through my Website, and listened to all of my audio clips. So I followed up and said, "Hey, I sent you a press packet, and from looking at my Web traffic logs, I know someone from your company was on my site!"

His response?

"Ahh, you found me! Caught me sneaking around your site did you? Damn that hi-falootin technology!"

Followed by a desire to bring me in on the studio's upcoming project. Granted, this may or may not happen, but I was able to create an opportunity that wasn't there before.

I can also see where people are spending their time, and what's keeping them glued to my content ("gauging the stickiness"), and change my site based on that.

A few notable examples:

• Notice that www.AdamCreighton.com now routes to this acting blog, rather than the "Welcome" page? That's because people who get to my blogs stay on blogs, browsing through current and past postings.
  
• I recently repackaged my blogs from the serviceable blogger.com templates, into the rest of my website, which hugely upped traffic to the rest of my site.
  
• I recently broke out "Demos" and "Clips" into "Voice" and "Video", which has driven viewing of the video clips way up.
  

I also use the stats to figure out what's not working for me. As example, there are a couple of online services I've paid into for this year that have sent zero people to my website (and I haven't gotten any offline bookings). So, why should pay into these next year?

A lot of work, yes, but since the relaunch of my site in January (after signing with a new agent), I've seen a 10-fold increase in unique visitors each month to my site, and a trendline increase of around 5-fold in total hits.

I've got an acting buddy who responded thusly when I mentioned my recent Web traffic:

"4000 indeed...4000 people read your mom."

(Yeah, he's a little weak on the smack talk area; evidently, the extent of his competitive sporting experience growing up was "I played karate".)

Anyway, for his education (and your interest), here are the Year-to-Date numbers for AdamCreighton.com Unique Visitors and Total Hits:





Ninety-percent business; Ten-precent craft.

One hundred percent relationships, so don't let stuff like this get in the way of that.