Online statistics are a tremendously valuable tool for anyone trying to do business on the Internet. They can also be seductive and maddening.

For example, our gallery website gets about 525,000 hits a month, but this last October it received a whooping 1,048,825 hits (our first month over one million hits) and 48% of those hits came on October 7, 2004.

I called my ISP to verify that this was correct and not a blip in their stats program, and the stats are correct.

So now I'm going crazy trying to figure out what happened on October 7, 2004 to cause nearly half a million people to come to our gallery website.

And the closest answer that I can come up with, is the fact that on October 7, 2004 I was on the Kojo Nmandi show!

But that fact alone cannot equate to 458,448 hits in one day, and in reviewing the show's audio files, the website is never given out or mentioned. And most of the hits came during hour three of that Internet day, whatever that means. And 36% of the hits that month came directly to the gallery URL, which means that those people knew our website; only about 5% of the hits came through referral from search engines.

Next is for us to review our October sales and see how many Internet sales we had in October.