How To Blog for Newbies Day 30

It would be great if you could find out how many people were frequenting your blog daily. How would you like it if you can do the following all for free:

a. Which pages your visitors were viewing?

b. How long they spent reading each page?

c. How many returning visitors vs new ones?

You know, all you need is just a Google account. Just go to www.google.com/analytics and sign in. Once logged in, Google will give you a simple Java Script to include on your site. If you are using WordPress, you would just need a suitable plugin to put in the site code and your analytic would be up for business within 24 hours.

Getting Started

Once logging into Analytics, the Dashboard would be displayed prominently.

1. The graph shows the number of visitors coming to your blog per day. At a glance, it will show whether your website or blog’s traffic is rising or falling.

After getting an idea of where the traffic trend is heading, you need to focus on specific dates to get the micro-picture. Go to the top right of the dashboard and click on the desired date duration, for example from yesterday to today’s date.

2. Move to the bottom right of the screen is your Content Overview. This panel would show you which pages on your blog are the most frequented. This piece of intelligence could help you in figuring out where you need to place your advertising or affiliate on your website for maximum effect.

In addition, try to figure out how to increase the blog traffic to less visited pages. If visitors do not come to these pages via search engines, you may be able to market these pages using social medias like Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

3. Pay attention to the navigation bar on the left. For example, click on Content, then to Top Exit Pages. This view usually tells you which pages readers looked at immediately before leaving your blog.

Chances are you may identify a pattern why people are leaving via the specific pages. Can you carry out some optimization for the page like adding more links; tweeting, stumbling, digging or writing an article in ezine that could redirect traffic to it?

4. Click on the Traffic Sources at the navigation bar.

This tool can tell a story about which search engines and websites are directing traffic to your blog. Pay attention to average time spend by the visitors coming from the different refering sites. What kind of visitors will spend longer a time reading your pages? What cause those patrons to leave so early? Is it due to the misleading nature of your title?

The search engine data could imply to you which keywords lead to your site and how often they perform so. This should tell you whether you are optimizing the right keywords for your website.

5. Last but not least, the Content tab has a small link called Site Overlay. Considered to be one of Analytics’ best trick, it launches your blog with percentage click through pasted over the top. This gives you a visual impression on where visitors are clicking when they are viewing your page.

How To Blog For Newbies Day 28

Bloggers should expect to witness an exhilarating 2010. Trends that have been evolving over the course of the past years are creating new opportunities for blog owners as well as e-marketers.

Source: koreatimes.co.kr

Blogging communities are inevitably linked to the real world. The economy doldrums that spans for the last 10 years; from the collapse of the dot coms, the currency crises to the current financial mismanagement have all helped to shape a new world order. Both these man-made and natural disasters give leverage to the strength of Social Medias like Twitter, Facebook. By the time you are reading this, a dozen new ones should have been hatched. What we are talking here are global real time conversation and mass word-of-mouth at the speed of a click.

With those events unfolding, as well as with the advances with new science and technology, what follows are 10 scorching trends that affect all areas of blog marketing, from advertising to branding and everything in between.

1. Be A Trusted Authority

Like you and me, most netizens have gone through the ups and downs of the turbulent events throughout the past decade. Therefore, don’t expect your would-be audience to swallow wholely what a blogger tell them.

Blogs that are determined to be sincere and honest about their topics will generate desirable readers responses. Building trust is the utmost priority in 2010 and beyond and bear in mind, this is not easy. In other words, honesty is an ongoing effort and once you have earned it, you need to make sure you keep it!

2. Find other ways of monetization instead of concentrating on Adsense

Many established bloggers acknowledge this. The day when you can merely depend on adsense for an honest income is over. Bloggers need to be more enterprising in this new era.

3. Provide Value To Your Readers

Tips and ‘how tos’ are found in abundance in the internet. Be sure to update your knowledge and as far as possible, try to provide the latest ‘know how’ or news to your audience. Invest in good books regularly so that you could stay at the top of your game and as such, be an authority in the topic of your choice.

4. Prove your point

Blog readers do not believe in everything they read. Remember, you are trying to reach out to a global group of sophisticated ‘customers’ whom are both web-savvy and technology-inclined.

As a result, don’t just tell, prove your point by quoting evidence. If you are selling a service in let’s say, ‘increasing your Twitter followers in hours’, make sure you back your claim by having at least 10,000 followers in your own twitter account.

5. Adopt and engage in Social Medias

Microblogging or social medias are the new kids on the block. Bloggers beware, there is actually a real threat that blogging will be ousted by the likes of Facebook, Twitters, Linkedin and Foursquare. The massacre is real and there are only 2 options left to survive this ‘bloodbath’. Join the party and don’t give up on your blog (because only your blog could stay loyal to you).

6. Stay up-to-date with the latest net happening

Do you know that Facebook has overtaken Google as the largest search engine? With this information in your grasp, how should you leverage on the new trend?

7. Build real relationship

In the real world; built out from the brick and mortar, marketing could only differentiate and strategise on your overall objective. At the end of the day, you still need the human touch of a professional sales personnel to infiltrate into the market to make the sales conversion.

Same concept applies when it comes to blog marketing. With the advent of web 2.0, we should make use of Twitter and Facebook to build up lasting friendship instead of merely tweeting about your latest post or affiliate programs. Friends will support you, not strangers.

8. You need not be a tech-wizard; but just be tech-savvy

Learn up as much as possible about video and mobile marketing. They are set to explode in 2010. Learn how to create a simple online video using Youtube or Vimeo. Then find out about at least one video conversion software in the market. Who knows, the skill will come in handy when you least expected it. I forsee the coming of a real time Video Social Media similar to Google Wave in the fourth quarter of 2010. Wanna bet?

9. Stay focus

You can’t afford to be a Jack Of All Trades And Master Of None in 2010. Focus on 1 to 3 niches. If you could afford it, hire a team to run the day to day operation for you. The strongest brands are always the most focused brand.

Build your base and build it as strong as possible before you extend your resources and branch out into new ventures.

10. Adopt integrated blog marketing tactics

It should be absolutely essential to combine all possible marketing strategies for your blog in 2010. The amount of internet marketing communications that a person see each day is overwhelming.

As a result, use all kinds of method to get your blog message across. SEO tricks, building links, directory submissions, press release, social medias and this list is by no means exhaustive. Learn how directories work and find out more about social bookmarking sites.

How To Blog For Newbies Day 25

Apart from Digg, Stumble Upon and Reddit, there are many other social bookmarks that we bloggers can utilize to market our blogs. Apart from introducing these sites to newbies and seasoned bloggers, I would also be conducting some experiments on SEO using this post, so just bear with me. In the mean time, make use of these fantastic blogging tools for free promotion to the internet.

Source : www.doublejdesign.co.uk

1. Technorati

2. Slashdot

3. Digg

4. Reddit

5. Newsvine

6. Squidoo

7. Stumble Upon

8. Ask

9. Propeller

10. Mister Wong

11. Mixx

12. Folkd

13. Diigo

14. Connotea

15. Jumptags

(How to blog and Blogging tips for newbies. How To Blog dot Org)

How To Blog For Newbies Day 24

This should not be my topic for the day. Only two days ago, I was bragging in Twitter that I would be coming out with my first Video Blog using Camtasia and boy, was I excited. But as fate has it, I encountered some problems while trying to upload the file to Youtube. Anyway, the experiment can wait and you would probably gain more by reading my blogging tips, for now.

Please reflect on your website for a moment. Have you been following How To Blog and Blogging Tips for some time? If you are like me, whom have just started a blog not too long ago, chances are you are an unknown rookie. Do your audience naturally associate your subject with a generic name?

Generic name is defined as name of a successful (and usually the first) product, used commonly by people to name an entire category or class of products. Amplifier, camera, notebook and computer are some great examples of what were once exclusive brand names but now refer to all brands under their respective category of products. Generic names cannot be owned by anyone, not even by the firm who first introduced them.

Source : www.searchenginejournal.com

Let’s take ‘camera’ as an example. Anyone interested in a camera would naturally think of Canon, Nikon, Olympus. Is your name or company easily identifiable with the product?

If  you own a company which is very identified with camera, you should target the word ‘camera’ in your blog which is categorized under the company’s website. You make every kind of camera there is. Portable cameras, diving cameras, SLR cameras, DSLR cameras, digital cameras. You make every variety of camera known to man, so it’s only natural that you go after the big broad word.

What if you are not the owner or director of Nikon?  What if you are only a small time camera collector? Although it’s tempting to target the word ‘camera’ like the big guns, bear in mind the word command 310 million searches in Google alone daily. You probably think that by fishing in where the fishes are, you would probably get some of those searchers.

The fact is, the word is too hot for you and you will definitely get burned. You would need to compete with probably millions of websites or renowned blogs which are well optimized with this keyword ‘camera’. There are two outcomes if you are still stubborn on using the keyword:

1. You garner very few clicks. If you are lucky, it may take months or even years for the net audience to find your blog. Remember the competition?

2. You get many clicks but low conversion. For instance, you might hold a promotion to give away free cameras to entice an audience to your site. Many folks will click your site through social bookmarks or via your tweet. However, if you don’t talk about what they want for example ‘pinhole camera’, they will abandon your site and never to return again.

Here, you would encounter with a problem called overheated meanings.

a. Related Meanings

If you blog about real estate insurance, and a group of particular audience was searching for real estate financing, the bounce rate would be substantial if they don’t find what they want.

b. Multiple audiences

The keyword ‘security’ carries different meaning to an antivirus software enthusiast as compared to a home burglar alarm researcher. As with the ‘camera’ example, sometimes you can add qualifying words like ‘pc security’ or ‘home security’ to bring down the heat for the word to make the temperature just right for your niche audience.

c. Multiple intents

A job seeker may look for the word ‘job’, whereas employers would psychologically search for help with ‘recruitment’. And both might dig for the word ‘recruiters’ (which is too hot a keyword) in Google.

d. Singular and plural meaning changes

Search engines look for both the singular and plural forms of a word, and that can sometimes cause overheating. ‘Sale’ has a different meaning from ‘sales’. A would be camera buyer would search for the word ‘camera sale’ and a job seeker may instead look for ‘camera sales’. See my point.

e. Acronyms

‘FIA’ could mean Federation Internationale de’l Automobile (the body that holds F1 racing) or Fitness Institute Australia!

Most bloggers whom are less familiar with SEO will follow the mantra ” the more the merrier” hypothesis. If ‘wordpress blogging tools’ is a good keyword for your blog, ‘blogging’ will be even better. Millions of people are searching for ‘blogging’ that is sure fire way to drive in optimized traffic. Look here, I’m just being sarcastic.

Instead of looking for hot keywords that might burn your time, effort or even money for those who uses ppc, look for “just right” words instead.

(How to blog and Blogging tips for newbies. How To Blog dot Org)