Assessments Blog

Archive for January, 2012

More and more blogs are created every day but some people still think that setting up a blog is difficult or that you need to have a lot of technical knowledge. This is a misconception and actually the opposite is true. Setting up a blog is easy.

If you want to set up a blog you should consider visiting Blogger.com. Blogger.com is a free blog platform, owned by Google, that let’s you set up your very own weblog within minutes.

Blogger.com is used by many beginners as it offers an easy to use platform. You can write posts easily and even change huge parts of your layout, which is not normal for a free blog.

Another reason why it is so popular is because of its tight integration with Google Adsense. Adsense is an advertisement serving program which let’s bloggers earn money by showing ads on their web site.

How Do I Set Up a Blogger.com Blog Visit Blogger.com Click on Create A Blog, this will lead you to a new page. Either log in to your Google Account or create a new account by entering the requested data. Click on Continue and once again you will be lead to a new page On the page, fill in the required data such as your blog title or the domain. Again click on Continue and you will be lead to a page where you can choose your blog template. A template is just the rough design of your blog. Choose one of the templates. Clicking on Continue will lead you to the last page on which it says that you successfully created a blog. You can now visit your blog under [yourdomain].blogspot.com

It wasn’t really hard was it?

It is software, which is used for the creation of blogs. WordPress provides tons of features and customizing tools to excel your blog. However, WordPress.com is the same platform like Blogspot.com.

Differences

1. WordPress is really easy to use. It provides many tools to its users free. There is no problem of editing in the blog. User may change theme at any time by accessing plugins area in WordPress.com. Blogspot does not provide this sort of facility easily.

2. There are millions of themes on the WordPress.com. You cannot have such themes on the Blogspot. Themes are very important for your blog, because they provide beauty to your blog. You can also put many different codes, CSS and plugins in the blog to customize it.

3. Both Blogspot and WordPress almost provide the same facilities of posting to their users. They have different features and tips for novice bloggers.

4. WordPress helps to increase your reputation by enhancing your professional abilities. Your blog looks more accurate and well, if you use WordPress.com. To make money blog, it is recommended that you should join the WordPress.com.

5. Both services offer the free of cost blogging. You can make your own blog with the little effort and without using any money.

6. WordPress offers good and nice plugins for blogging. Most important is that, these all plugins are almost free of cost. More than 9000 plugins are available for your blog at any time. Your blog will look more beautiful and appealing to any user.

7. WordPress is SEO friendly platform. However, Blogspot is also good for this purpose. WordPress has many plug-ins for this purpose.

Tracking your visitors is critical to your Blogger blogs success. You need to know how people are finding your blog, how many people are viewing each post, how many of your readers convert into customers (or ad clicks,) and how to use this gathered information to improve your traffic and conversion rates.

Google has a free tool called Google Analytics that will allow you to track almost anything that your readers and visitors do while on your Google Blogger blog. This free tool from Google is the industry standard when it comes to tracking. Don’t bother with the simple traffic counters as they will not give you all the information you need. Here are some of the things you will want to keep track of:

1) Total Traffic To Your Blog

You want to keep track of how many visitors you have and what they are viewing. By keeping track of the total visits to your blog you will be able to gauge what is working and what is not. This is very important to those that are advertising or collecting names, as you already know each visitor has a value.

2) Track Conversion Rates

With Google Analytics you can keep track of specific goals. For example your blog may be setup to collect names and email addresses. Google Analytics will allow you to track what percentage of your readers give you their name and email address. You will also be able to track how your visitors found your blog (keyword, search engine, referring site or advertisement,) what page they landed on and then pinpoint the specific page that convinced them to give you their name and email (aka: a conversion.)

With this information you will be able to improve your sign-up rates in several ways. If you discover that a specific keyword sending traffic to your website has a 90% conversion rate you can work on improving your search engine rankings for that keyword. If you notice that 50% of your potential registrations leave while reading your “Terms of Service” page, you can modify that page to decrease the loss of registrations. If you see that 30% of the visitors you get from YouTube decide to convert you can focus more effort on your video marketing campaigns. There are literally hundreds of other metrics you can use to improve your conversion rates as well, but without tracking your visitors you would never discover them!

3) Track The Physical Location Of Your Visitors

If you advertise online (specifically with Google Ads) Google Analytics will be immensely valuable to you. Google can log where your visitors are physically located. First by country then drilled down from there. You may discover that 90% of your traffic is for some reason coming from a specific city in California. Based on this metric you could create a targeted advertisements for that specific location. Not only would you save money on your ad campaigns, your ads would be far more targeted to the location. On top of that, if you ever plan on hosting an event, you will know which cities will be easiest to market to.

Data is collected over time. Even if you don’t know how to read it, make sense of it or improve your website from it, it is absolutely critical that you start tracking your sites visitors immediately. You will eventually need to access this priceless data.