One way of knowing whether anyone is visiting your website is looking at your results. Are people signing up for your mailing list? Are they buying your products or services? While this gives you some indication it certainly does not tell the whole story. You need to look at your website statistics to really know if your traffic is increasing over time, holding steady, or declining.
Additionally, you can use your website statistics to calculate your opt-in percentage rates for your mailing list and your sales conversion rates for your sales pages. Once you know your conversion rates, you can then begin work to improve them by making changes to your site, and measuring the results. You can test different headlines, different offers, different pricing, and optimize your site so it is most effective using this tracking information.
On a more basic level, you can see where your website traffic is coming from (are those articles you're posting on that article directory sending any traffic your way?) and you can monitor your traffic over time. Ideally, the longer you market your website, the more your website traffic should increase. You want to track this, so if this is not the case you can take steps to improve.
Your web hosting company should provide website tracking statistics at no extra charge. Some hosting companies provide better stats and reporting than others. The good news is, even if your web hosting company doesn't provide very comprehensive stats reports, there is a great third party option for getting comprehensive website stats.
It's called Google Analytics and it's free! Once you register for your free account, it will provide you with some html code to add to each page of your website. Once you've done that, you can access comprehensive website statistics reports for that website. And, you can register more than one site.
I just started using Google Analytics and so far I like what I see. Have you tried Google Analytics? If so I'd love to hear what you think. Post a comment and share.