Many site small business owners' eyes glaze over when people start talking about analytics, click through rates, and abandonment funnels. Really, there's a lot of jargon that goes with measuring a site with analytics.

Small business owners should be paying attention to their site analytics because the data provides useful insights into their site traffic, which ultimately leads to more sales. If you're not paying attention to your site analytics, your business is leaving money on the table.

Most businesses generate a lot of data, but relatively few use it effectively to create competitive advantage and enable high performance. Accenture’s Dave Rich, Brian McCarthy and Jeanne Harris use research findings and their experience to outline how high-performance businesses are using analytics to pull ahead of competitors and turn data into actionable insights.

The question that thousands of experts, bloggers, publishers, and content creators want answered is, "If there is so much free content on the Web, what content will people actually pay for?"

Having been involved with launching more than 1,000 paid-content websites over the last few years, many of which are now very profitable businesses, I've concluded that the following are attributes that enable them to charge for their content.

The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the most popularly adopted best practice implementation available today and includes an IT management framework emphasizing management from the perspectives of both the business and IT service consumers. By utilizing a pragmatic approach to implementing ITIL, significant improvements to an IT infrastructure can be achieved with a quick return on investment, motivated staff involvement, and minimal operational disruption during deployment.

Editor's Note: more of an overview of what ITIL is than a true guide to implementing it, but useful for those new to the ITIL concept. Just ignore the last couple of pages which go on to do a soft sell of the vendor's product.

Dave Schappell, founder and CEO of TeachStreet, talks about his company’s transition from a free to a paid service, and shares five tips that may help other startups make the leap as well.

It's important to ensure that visitors find the information and products they're looking for once they arrive. Whether you're marketing an e-commerce, informational, or B2B site, your site search is a critical feature of your site and deserves your time and attention.

By making some small improvements to your site search, you can reap higher conversion rates, more leads, and happier repeat customers.

One of the most lucrative assets companies own could be the data they possess. The challenge is turning it into relevant, usable information. Analytics can be a powerful tool in this effort. Accenture profiles a five-step model for putting analytics at the center of corporate decision making.

Companies that make the deep strategic, organizational, and operational shifts required to become effective digital marketers can not only make themselves more agile and productive but also accelerate revenue growth.

Businesses collect mountains of data and spend vast sums storing and protecting them. Yet excess data carry a steep price tag for storage, maintenance, and protection, and incalculable potential costs in terms of liability. Similarly, most companies guard their intellectual property at great expense. Yet many efforts to safeguard intellection property are ineffectual or even counterproductive – depressing the value of that which they hope to protect.

Predictive analytics enables you to develop mathematical models to help you better understand the variables driving success. Predictive analytics relies on formulas that compare past successes and failures, and then uses those formulas to predict future outcomes.

This article provides a quick explanation of the nine most common data-mining techniques used in predictive analytics. Becoming familiar with them will go a long way toward enabling you to recognize patterns in customer preferences and buying behavior.

I understand that you may be trying to start a company and build a website on a shoe string budget.

You may think that you are saving money by hiring an individual or a small Web design shop to create your website.

You may think that you are getting a real deal because the individual or tiny shop happens to be highly creative and truly talented.

You may think that you are saving money by not having an IP attorney review the contract, if any.

You may think that you own the website design and logo that you paid to have designed. Your Web designer may even tell you that you do.

You may think that the contract that the Web designer gives you really assigns the copyright to you because it vaguely talks about ownership and copyrights in the same paragraph.

You may think that your Web designer will understand copyright law and not rip off other sites and put infringing material on your site.

YOU MAY BE VERY, VERY WRONG!

In recent years, many of the most significant corporate success stories have been because of IT innovations. Despite the gloomy economic mood, success stories like Amazon's Kindle demonstrate that the value of IT innovation has not diminished. In fact, leading executives understand that IT innovation is a major factor for their companies' bottom lines and future growth.

Although most companies realize that business units and the technology organization must be much more integrated, many don’t know how to make this happen. Leaders of business units sometimes have only a vague sense of technology’s value, while technology executives often fail to address issues in terms that businesspeople find meaningful. In an imaginary memo to a CEO, a chief technology officer proposes a solution: an annual report for technology, analogous to the annual report for investors and the broader market.

Stoney deGeyter offers up The Best Damn Web Marketing Checklist, Period!, a master website marketing checklist covering over 400 specific items over 23 topics. These topics include things such as website development, SEO, usability, accessibility, etc. This list doesn't cover any "how tos," which are essential ingredients to successful online marketing, but sometimes you need to first know what to do so you can then discover how to do it.

Usability evaluations are good for many things, but determining a team’s priorities is not one of them. The Molich experiment proves a single usability team can’t discover all or even most major problems on a site. But usability testing does have value as a shock treatment, trust builder, and part of a triangulation process. Test for the right reasons and achieve a positive outcome.

Six steps to getting Web site visitors to take your link bait and how to hold on to them.

FutureNow analyzes and expands on Seth Godin's list of difficult and important questions you have to answer before you spend a nickel on a site redesign.

Your search and clickstream data is missing a key ingredient: customer intent. You have all the clicks, the pages people viewed, and where they bailed, but not why they came to the site. Your internal site-search data contains that missing ingredient: intent. Learn five ways to analyze your internal site-search data—data that’s easy to get, to understand, and to act on.

Web design is to a large extent a creative process and can therefore be called more art than science. But because it is intrinsically a medium of presentation, some rules (or at least principles) apply. By following some simple pointers, anyone should be able to create a visually pleasing design and take one step closer to fame. Okay, it’s not that simple, and talent and experience do matter, but anyone can turn their home page into something prettier within mere minutes. (Hat tip to@ManiBodhi)

A joint effort by IT and business leaders can help companies not only to save money but also to prepare for the return of growth.

Chris Anderson’s book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” is essentially an extended elaboration of Stewart Brand’s famous declaration that “information wants to be free.” The digital age, Anderson argues, is exerting an inexorable downward pressure on the prices of all things “made of ideas.” Anderson does not consider this a passing trend. Rather, he seems to think of it as an iron law: “In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.” In this article, Malcolm Gladwell challenges the core assertions underlying the book.

Many IT organizations are buckling under the pressure of corporate expectations--not because of a lack of know-how, but because of excessive complexity that has developed over time. By building an IT application blueprint, you can remain flexible enough to meet the changing needs of the business.

According to Marketing Experiments, friction can be defined as psychological resistance to a given element of your sales process that causes aggravation, fatigue or confusion. While impossible to eliminate resistance, your goal is to minimize it as much as possible.

We’ve all heard the adage, “You’re only as strong as your weakest link.” For many e-tailers, both large and small, the weakest link lies in the checkout process. Mistakes at this critical juncture are costly and unnecessary. Below, I’ve gathered 12 of the most common mistakes I see with checkouts.

Here are the nine ways your audience will respond to your online content.