Assessments Blog

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.

BlogSpot is a service that allows you to create your own blog that you can use for whatever. You can post photos, use it as journal, hold discussion forums. You can interact with people in any way that you like.

If you want to know how to search for people on BlogSpot then get some ideas from the following article. There is really not that much involved with this search. To search through some of the available blogs you can use blogsearch.google.com. Go to blog search home and you will find an advanced option search and a preferences search. You can choose the advanced search option.

From the advanced search options you will have the option of searching for blogs in certain countries and languages only. It is one way of narrowing down the search as these searches usually produce multiple results. Just some tips on how to search for people on BlogSpot. There are other sub options that you will find here as well.

Once you’ve selected your advanced search options then you can start searching. You have the option of searching the entire web for the blog or you can search Google blogs only. Like I said if you want to know how to search for people on BlogSpot, there is really not that much involved. It is a simple search as I am sure you can see and I do not think you can run into any problems with this search. If you have your own blog try searching for your blog and whether you can get results for that. Then you can move on and search for other people’s blogs.

With the increased interest in Blogging (web Logging), many web hosting providers now provide an assortment of free usage, open source blogging software packages. Among the most popular of these blogging tools are B2evolution, WordPress and Nucleus. Each of these programs offer similar basic features, so the question arises as to which one is easiest to use and would be appropriate for the requirements of your particular website.

The answer lies in the true purpose of your blog website. If your primary goal is to share your opinions and ideas with the general public, you would want to utilize a different blogging tool than a user who was creating product blogs as a commercial sales effort. A blog for search engine promotion would have entirely different requirements. All of these uses are viable reasons to create a blog, however each requires different features to be successful.

WordPress Blogging Software

Available for free download at: http://wordpress.org/

It is hard to beat WordPress for general personal blogging. WordPress is an open source, state-of-the-art personal publishing platform with a focus on presentation and usability. Everything related to creating and updating your blog is available through an intuitive graphical interface. With WordPress there is no need to compile your work. You simply write your column. You then select the features you want and your blog is instantly created and published to your website.

If you are on vacation, you can schedule your uploads for some date in the future or even email your column to the server! The system allows multiple users with multiple blogs divided into categories and sub-categories. This allows multiple family members or friends to create their own blogs along with yours.

Easy customization and the availability of many “plug-ins” that provide more functionality (add new features as you learn) makes this software a very good choice for most individuals.

B2evolution

Available for free download at: http://b2evolution.net/

B2evolution is another advanced web log tool that features an integrated XHTML validator. It supports recursive subcategories, cross posting and has a really cool integrated “skinning” system.

The “skinning” system allows you to create multiple blogs in separate categories with different appearances for each blog. You simply “change the skin” for the blog to create a totally new look and feel.

The “skinning” feature, combined with the built in multi-user administration management tool, makes the system robust enough for more commercial endeavors, such as product promotion blogs. If you have much to publish with multiple themes, this is the software you are looking for.

Nucleus Blogging Software

Available for free download at: http://nucleuscms.org/

Though Nucleus is an extremely robust blogging tool in its own right, it also contains some powerful features that can provide benefits in promotion of your blog.

Nucleus offers the ability to optimize its URLS, creating simple page addresses that do not have and “&” or “=” characters. This makes the pages search engine (and user) friendly. Another great feature is the ability to show the contents of multiple weblogs on one page. This could allow a
website owner to manipulate the optimum text / keyword balance on pages for better search engine rankings.

Nucleus also provides RSS and Atom feeds that can be extremely helpful when promoting a website. If part of your blog’s function is to work as a search engine marketing and promotion tool, Nucleus is an exceptional software package.

Each of these blogging software packages offer the basic tools that you would need to create a successful blog and all three are PHP – MySQL open source (free to use) packages. You should try to select the software that helps you achieve the long term goal that you have in mind for your website based on the unique extra features offered by each.