You’ve picked the template, got your blog set up, chosen the direction of your content, but once you’ve launched, how do you know how people are finding you?

Just about every web host gives you some simple statistics software with your account, but they aren’t always the funnest things to read.  You need something a bit more graphical, and you really can’t go wrong with something like Google Analytics.

You just set up your account, insert a bit of code in your page, and the service tracks just about every thing you can think of in the way stats.  How long they stay on your site, what they read, how they arrived at your page, and more.  It is well worth your time to set up and study every so often.  When you see something working, don’t beat it to death, but you certainly can do follow up posts.  Over time you’ll get a feel for what works before you even write a word.

I mentioned the other day how you need to make sure to design your blog for as many users as you can. This doesn’t apply to just your physical design though, you also need to do it with your content. Who are you writing for? Who are you targeting? What do you wish to accomplish?

If your blog is a corporate tool, then you need to set guidelines for what can and can not be discussed, and it needs to be written in stone. You need to avoid controversial subjects, and you need to always portray a professional image. The drawback to this tact is that it can get mind numbingly boring for the writer, and the reader, fairly quickly.

There are ways to be corporate, but still have some fun. Switch your posts up by having one to two days a week be about business, have a day for fun, and make up the rest of the week talking about news stories that impact your industry. The whole point is you have to keep things fresh and engaging. If you just talk about the widget your company came out with over-and-over, your readers just won’t even bother looking at it after a little while.

I talked the other day about how tempting it is to sell text links, but I would suggest against it. Well, sadly, I have been proven right.

According to information from Search Engine Journal, Google has confirmed via email that they are in deed penalizing sites for selling text links.

The partial update to visible PageRank that went out a few days ago was primarily regarding PageRank selling and the forward links of sites. So paid links that pass PageRank would affect our opinion of a site.

Going forward, I expect that Google will be looking at additional sites that appear to be buying or selling PageRank.

In short, no matter what you may think of Google, they account for 60 – 90% of search traffic depending on the country you look at. You can’t afford to damage your reputation with them in any way, so make sure you stay abreast of the latest developments, such as this one.

When sitting down to start thinking about the look and feel of your blog, you need to ponder who you are designing for. Just because you have some super fast fiber optic cable to your house, doesn’t mean John in the middle of the woods does. There are still people on dial-up access in this world, and they still make up approximately 3% of most web sites traffic.

So do you design with them in mind? In a way, yes. I still optimize all images for my sites for 56k modems. It just compresses them and makes them easier to load with no real lose of quality. It’s a small thing, and puts less stress on your server anyway. That’s just one small thing, but make sure anytime you add something flashy to your site, ask yourself two questions: Does it add any real value and will it make it harder for people on slower connections to use my site? Just because something is pretty, it doesn’t mean it belongs on your blog.

It may seem silly to design with the dial-up customers, but can you really afford to turn 3% of people away from your business?

One drawback to running a blog on your own is having to update.  It really is the only major drawback, but the advantages of controlling all aspects of your own site is worth it in the end.

All that being said, the brains at WordPress have already upgraded the recently released version 2.3 to 2.3.1.  You can read all about the fixes, and grab the update, here.  It seems to be a fairly major update with over 20 bug fixes for those where at 2.3 already.

Don’t ever think you can just skip these incremental updates as there are bots out there that look for older installs to attack.