I'm a huge fan of Quantcast. I've blogged before that it may be the best free tool for online marketers.

And now it's even better.

Two weeks someone showed me that whenever you are looking at a web site, to see how much traffic it has, that there are two arrows that PREVIOUS and NEXT, so if you are looking at the 100th most popular web site, you can click on NEXT and see the 101st most popular.

Internet entrepreneurs who study web analytics can find excuses all the time to celebrate small victories and large. Yesterday we had another one.

World Vital Records had its highest page views ever yesterday with 58,398. Our previous high was 43,828. As we add more and more content to our site (and all our new databases are free for 10 days), we will continue to generate buzz (14 mentions in the blogosphere yesterday) and more visitors. Our subscriber count continues to grow as well.

One of the pillars of a successful internet company is access to advanced web analytics and the ability to use them.

For years I've been setting up daily metrics spreadsheets for companies that I own or consult for. I have learned how critical it is to 1) set goals, 2) track results every day, 3) look for new channels continually, 4) and test new creative regularly.

When a startup company looks at a mature internet company's analytics and daily spreadsheets, it can be overwhelming.

I asked the question in my last post, "Will Compete's toolbar become an essential tool for internet marketers." After 15 minutes with the tool, and after watching the excellent Flash presentation about what this service aims to do, I answer with a resounding, "Yes!"

My favorite slide in the Flash presentation was this:

Bill Gross, one of the world's most prolific entrepreneurs and an inspiration to me for more than 10 years, officially launched Compete.com today. (See the Alexa Chart for Compete.com.)

I just downloaded the Compete toolbar. The graphics indicates that 2 million people are already sharing their clicks so that we can all know better what sites are popular and what sites we can trust.

Yesterday we held a Provo Labs Academy training session on landing page optimization. I played about 15 minutes of excerpts from the May 23rd MarketingExperiements.com conference call recording. They described how they increased the conversion rate of a hypnosis product landing page by 40% by improving the layout and design slightly.

They also offer some excellent guidelines for landing page design at the end of their report.

We also reviewed the landing page design guidelines listed in the free 30-page report from Enquiro.com (Inside the Mind of the Searcher) from 2004. (Registration is required.) Here is the list they provide:

Interesting Inc. article about doing low budget TV advertising and buying remnant inventory from TV stations to generate new business for your company. The $3,000 brings in 100 calls (that's $30 per call) and generated web site traffic as well.

Josh Kopelman has a great post about Domino Rally business models that are so complicated and involve so many "ifs" that the chance for success is extremely low. It's much better to have a Two Domino business model, where you know that if you do two things really well, you will be profitable.

As important as it is to increase clickthroughs from your Google/Yahoo/MSN keyword campaigns by using Dynamic Keyword Insertion, it is even more important to match each one of those ads with a customized landing page that will maximize your conversion rate.

Here's a good article that lists 11 things you can do to improve your landing pages.