Site statistics play a critical role in my online business. But you might be surprised by the sorts of things that I pay attention to.

Most new Internet professionals focus on a few data points such as hits, pageviews or unique visitors. While those data points are fine, they are what I refer to as "passive stats" - they don't give you much in terms of actionable steps that you can take to improve your site's success. Plus, passive stats are too easy to manipulate and artificially inflate.

Instead of focusing on passive stats, you should focus on active stats. Here's how.

1. Monitor traffic sources

You should constantly be looking at your referral logs to see which sites are driving traffic to your site. As you experiment with various marketing and promotion techniques, you can quickly learn which are working and which aren't. Which blogs are worth commenting at? Well, the ones that actually send good traffic to your site. As you learn the types of marketing actions that result in targeted traffic, you can optimize the time you spend marketing.

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Most bloggers don't realize how important it is to stay ahead of the curve.

To make matters worse, most bloggers are looking at stats from the day before.

But what if I told you that in the last two days I've made over $180 just by identifying an emerging search trend the minute it broke, and capitalizing on it? And what if I told you that you could do the very same thing.

The fact is that almost every statistics program out there gives you day-old stats. But with day-old stats, you're a day behind on emerging search trends. Sure, if you have cPanel you might be able to look at "Latest Visitors" but that doesn't give you a good overall pictures of what's happening on your site at any given moment.

If you want to stay ahead of the curve, then you need live blog stats. That's where pMetrics comes in. pMetrics offers up-to-the-second, live statistics, that scroll down your screen. Not only do I love this feature, but I've made hundreds of dollars by using it.

So here's the secret. Sign up for pMetrics. Use the Spy function to identify search trends on your site. Once you've identified a search trend, reinforce your content with phrase variations and deep inter-linking. You'll stay ahead of the curve and capitalize on searches your competitors didn't even know existed.