he Green Sheet's Web site, GS Online, achieved a significant milestone in March 2005, receiving 2,721,525 hits in one month! This is an increase of almost 34% over the same period only a year ago, when our Web site had more than 2 million hits.

This increase marks the growing reach of GS Online. As the number of pages in The Green Sheet continues to climb (from 88 pages to 120 in the last year), so do the pages of content on our Web site.

GS Online not only saw increases in the total number of hits, but also in overall Web traffic throughout the site. The number of visits (a single user loading any number of pages without a 15-minute lapse), as well as the amount of data being transferred and downloaded, grew.

"The increases reflect that GS Online is the place for MLSs to go to find everything they need to stay on top of what's going on in the industry and achieve sales success," said Julie O'Ryan, President and Editor in Chief of The Green Sheet.

With all the new traffic, the Web site is more robust than ever. The Green Sheet owns multiple servers, housed at our Texas site, that handle thousands of GS Online users daily. The servers are scaled to support 20 times our current traffic levels.

The MLS Forum remains the most popular destination on GS Online. Others are For Immediate Release, the breaking news section on our home page; News From the Wire, where we post industry news throughout the day; The Resource Guide, a directory of companies and services in the payment processing industry; Fast Finder, our search engine; and the Company Name Generator.

In the last year, we've made several enhancements to GS Online. In August we announced a new and improved version of GS Online's RetailBusiness.com section, which lists businesses that offer payment processing products and services.

We also created Special Interest Publishing, a division of The Green Sheet Inc. that provides niche authors with a broad range of publishing and marketing expertise for books and Web sites.

Our mission at The Green Sheet has always been to support you, the individual sales professional in the payment processing industry. We have consistently developed and delivered "best in class" support tools for MLSs, available to you at no cost. We strive to bring you the right stuff, in the right way and at the right time: Now!