Your website provides technical information on the visitors to your site. Your website manager should be able to pull the file down for you. For those of you doing it yourself, look for a section on your administration panel that says ’stats’ or ‘visitor statistics.’

What type of information is available?

- The number of people who have visited your site

- The method your visitors are finding your site

- The things (i.e. tracks ) that are being downloaded from your site

- The pages that are being visited the most

Why is this technical data important? First, it provides you with immediate feedback on your progress. If you are seeing an increase in traffic to your site, then your marketing efforts are working. If they stall or plateau, then you need to re-vamp your efforts.

Second, it provides a non-objective way to discuss your progress and negotiate with others. When you are talking with a bar owner, agent, or some other management type, using the argument “We are a cool band. We have a big following.” isn’t very convincing. They hear that 100 times each week from every single band that they talk to.

However, imagine if you were to say - “We have grown our webpage visits by 23% month over month for the past 6 months and our email subscription has increase by 25 new fans each week for the past year.”

You’ve now provided a clear and non-biased way to demonstrate your fan base to the bar management. Much better.