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Posts Tagged ‘Blogger’

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.

Bloggers: Should You Use Blogger.com or WordPress?

Blogger.com (also known as Blogspot) and WordPress are the two most commonly used blogging platforms today. Blogger.com was a pioneer in the blogging industry, allowing users to set up accounts and blog for free beginning in 1999. Blogger.com was purchased by Google in 2003, which enabled it to grow using Google’s resources. Today, Blogger.com has an undisclosed number of millions of users blogging on their system.

WordPress began in 2003 as the successor to another (now relatively unknown) blogging system. It has since become the blog platform of choice for most blogging professionals. There are currently over two million people who are active users of WordPress.com, and there are millions of others who have downloaded various versions of the WordPress code.

Using the Blogger setup mandates that your blog be hosted on their servers. In comparison, blogs running on WordPress’ platform can be hosted at WordPress.com, or the WordPress software can be downloaded and used on your choice of web hosts. Below are some of the key features of Blogger.com versus the two versions of WordPress setups.

Blogger.com Features
Free hosting for up to 1 GB worth of space
Blog content is maintained on Blogger.com web servers
Ability to choose and customize templates (limited flexibility)
Easy to get started; easy to use
Upload and store image files and video files

WordPress.com Features
Free hosting for up to 3GB worth of space
Blog content is maintained on WordPress.com web servers
Ability to choose and customize templates (limited flexibility)
Easy to get started; easy to use
Upload and store image, video, and other (limited) file formats

WordPress Self-Hosted Features
Blog content is maintained on user’s preferred web host
Nearly unlimited ability to choose and customize templates and widgets
Takes some technical ability to setup and configure
Files support limited only by web server, which likely means virtually unlimited

Who Uses Which
A quick perusal of a few the various blogs running on the Blogspot.com domain versus those that use one of the WordPress setups (accounts on WordPress.com and self-hosted blogs using WordPress software) indicates that Blogspot.com is more commonly used for people who blog about their families, pets, and other personal kinds of topics. Compared to WordPress users, Blogger.com users are typically not “professional” bloggers, although there are plenty of Common Joe bloggers who monetize their Blogspot blogs and make a living doing it.

Self-hosted WordPress blogs lean more toward professional entities who have an IT person or department who handles their maintenance. They are often more formal. Because WordPress.com is similar in its functionality to Blogger.com, blogs using WordPress.com are similar to Blogger blogs in content, naturally more casual or personal than self-hosted WordPress blogs.

Cost
Blogspot accounts are free. So are accounts on WordPress.com. However, if you want to do any significant customization of your WordPress.com-hosted blog, you’ll have to pay to upgrade to their Custom CSS membership, which costs $14.97 per year. WordPress.com accounts can be upgraded to give you additional disk space($19.97/year for 5GB up to $89.97/year for 25GB), unlimited user accounts for your blog($29.97/year), and the ability to add videos (Blogger.com naturally has this support built in.) to your blog ($59.97/year). If your blog runs on the WordPress platform downloadable from WordPress.org, your costs are dependent upon your hosting account, which could cost as little as $5.00 per month or as much as hundreds of dollars monthly.

Flexibility
Because WordPress is open source software, it gives experienced bloggers much more flexibility when it comes to customizing a blog. When you download and install WordPress, you have full access to the database and the PHP, CSS, and image files that comprise the WordPress blogging platform. In contrast to Blogger’s platform, having development access to the entire system allows users to be as creative as they want to be. This flexibility does not exist to nearly the extent with accounts that are hosted on WordPress.com. One bonus that WordPress.com does provide is the ability to host files other than simply images. MS PowerPoint files, Word (.doc) and Open Office (.odt) word processing files, and PDF files can be uploaded and stored for use on a WordPress.com account.

Although Blogger allows and encourages users of their setup to customize their blogs adding Google gadgets and changing layouts, I’ve found that there is a lot of guesswork involved when trying to figure out how to manipulate their XML schema, which is used to customize templates beyond adding gadgets and changing layouts. When I customize blogs hosted on Blogger’s system, I often feel like I’m abstracted from their lower level setup. Some of Blogger’s XML tags are documented, but that documentation is sparse. When I’m customizing a Blogspot blog, it’s as if I’m throwing my work over a wall, and then checking to see what I get back. This interface can be frustrating.

A comparison that is noteworthy between each of these blog platforms is the ability to categorize posts. Greater flexibility exists with both WordPress.com-hosted blogs and self-hosted ones using the WordPress software than with Blogger.com. Categories are created using Labels on Blogger.com blogs. This setup does not allow for sub-categories on Blogger account. Sub-categories are a natural part of both WordPress.com and self-hosted WordPress blogs.

Ease of Use
For the layman blogger, getting started with blogging on Blogger’s platform is the simplest of tasks. You simply create an account, choose a template, and start writing away. The interface is very straight forward for users of Blogger. WordPress.com are similar, slightly more complicated. WordPress self-hosted blogs require a user to download the software, upload it to a server, configure database settings, and run the installation program included with the software. This process is pretty straightforward for someone with IT experience, but for most other people it is a little intimidating.

Once a blog is setup with any of these platforms, using it is simple enough regardless of which one you choose. However, of all the interfaces, Blogger.com is probably the easiest to understand and navigate.

Security and Updates
WordPress has had a history of vulnerability to hacks. To minimize that risk, it is recommended that users of WordPress be vigilant about maintaining their sites. Specifically, WordPress blog owners hosting their own blogs are encouraged to keep up with current updates.

Blogger users can essentially allow the Blogger development team to worry about hacks. Because the blog data is kept on Blogger’s servers, there is much less likelihood that Blogger sites can be hacked.

Which One’s Best for Me
If your intentions are simply to publish your information to the world without hassling with intense customization and continuing updates, Blogger.com is the way to go. Because most run-of-the-mill bloggers fit into this category, Blogger has the largest number (although nobody knows how many that is) of blogs in the Internet today.

If you have the resources and desire to be more sophisticated in your blogging habits, WordPress is what you should use. Accessibility to the inner workings of WordPress allows it to be used for much more than just a simple online journal. I recently talked to someone who told me his company uses WordPress software as a content management system, performing many of the functions of a CMS such as Joomla.

Blogspot is the blog host that is owned by Google. It is often chosen by beginning bloggers because it is customizable, easy to use and completely free. Bloggers don’t have to know anything about programming, even basic HTML, in order to customize a blog and create a site that they can use to promote their business or to sell items directly from the blog.

Free Blog Creation

Starting a blog with Blogspot is not only free, it’s also simple and easy to do in just a few minutes. The site has dozens of templates that can be used to create free blogs, each of which can be used with different fonts, images and components, giving the blog a truly customized look.

It has a number of different widgets to add to the websites, in order to make it easy to add a number of special features. Adding a blogroll, an archive or custom HTML to a site is easy to do with just a click. All of these items can be placed in a number of different locations on the site, and they can be moved around in just a few seconds.

Using AdSense on a Blog

Many people want to have a blog that brings in money with AdSense, and Blogspot is fully integrated with AdSense. With a single Google account, you can sign up for AdSense and a Blogspot blog and place the AdSense script on the site with just a click. This makes the process of monetizing a blog easy and accessible to everyone who wants a blog to bring in money.

Adding other ads to a Google blog is a way to make still more income from blogging. This is also an easy task when using Blogspot. The system allows bloggers to add a custom HTML widget anywhere they like, and this can be used for JavaScript as well. Either can be pasted directly into the widget for a quick and easy monetization.

Posting to a Google Blog

One of the best things about a blog is that it’s easy to write new posts for the site. The blog posts can be placed directly into a WYSIWYG box, eliminating the need for any coding. The blogger can add photos and videos directly into the posts, again without requiring any coding. This allows posts to be written quickly and to have them publish exactly the way they were envisioned rather than having to leave off parts of a blog because the blogger doesn’t have the coding knowledge needed to create them.