Writing by Brick Marketing on Wednesday, 30 of April , 2008 at 5:39 am
There are so many blog metrics tools around it can be hard to know which ones are best and how to use them. Here are three quick and dirty measurements that will often give you a good indication of your sites development.
Nothing succeeds like success and success can often be measured in popularity. Blog metrics could be just a simple measure of your popularity.
Is your traffic growing?
A simple tool like a site meter will tell you if your site is growing in popularity. They are not always accurate but as we are only after a rough indication, they will suffice. Your site may provide stats in the form of AWstats or similar. A steady growth in traffic indicates an increase in exposure.
Is your readership growing?
In contrast to visitors, this measures the number of subscribers you have to your RSS feeds. Is this number growing, falling or stagnant. A growth in numbers indicates a growth in interest either from your visitors, or from splogs looking to re-publish your content.
Are the frequency and quality of your comments growing?
As you gain more authority and your readership grows you should start to notice a distinct increase in the quality of the comments left on your posts. The number of comments should start to increase as well. There will always be certain topics that attract more comments than others, however the quality of the actual comment should become more focused and of more use to other readers. This acts bait to bring in more commenter’s .
These are very simple measurements. However if you can start to see a growth trend in all of these areas then perhaps it may be worth the effort of getting a more advanced blog metrics measurement tool - and learning how to use it.
In the short term, blog metrics does not need to be complicated. The three areas I have pointed out can be measured with a glance on a daily basis and will provide the basic information needed to determine growth. Blog metrics - who needs the complicated data?
Category: Blog Metrics
Writing by Brick Marketing on Tuesday, 8 of April , 2008 at 5:27 am
Blog metrics is an inexact science at the best of times. You can however give your Blog SEO strategies a real boost if you know how to read the Google Goldmine (aka Google Analytics) - the deeper you dig - the more gold you may find buried.
Google Analytics provides a wealth of information and sometimes it can be fairly daunting to try and wade through it all. However if you can try to learn how to use it, one section at a time, you will the information is not only useful, but information you can act on.
If you look at the visitors section as an example. Google Analytics provides a nice graphical representation of how your visitors arrived on your site. Where they referred, did they come from a search engine or did they come directly? Dig a little deeper and you can get a breakdown of those statistics.
For example, you can see which sites have referred traffic to your site and in what numbers. You can also see which search engines are referring traffic to you. Dig a little deeper again and you will see what search terms the visitors are using to find your site. Now you are starting to get to the meat.
By identifying which search terms are being used, you can gain a greater understanding of where you need to concentrate your keywords optimization. If you are using a list of a dozen or so keywords yet only getting hits from half that list, perhaps it time to review your keyword strategies. Are the keywords still relevant? Do you need to concentrate on some keywords a little more?
Most blog metrics packages allow you to look at these statistics. With a little thought you can turn this raw data into valuable information that will enable you to fine tune your blog SEO strategies. Tweak a keyword here, remove another keyword and replace it with a longtail that is more appropriate; suddenly your targeted traffic starts to increase.
As your traffic grows from search engine referrals you will be able to refine your strategies even further. Blog metrics are often ignored or only looked at with a passing interest. If you spend a little a time, you find they are little gold mines, the further you dig, the more valuable the information can become.
Category: Blog Metrics, Blog SEO
Writing by Brick Marketing on Thursday, 6 of March , 2008 at 7:26 am
How do you measure the success of your blog? The are many blog metric tools available however when it comes to measuring the success of your blog, sometimes the simplest statistics are the best. An interesting article by Paul Wright at Fish and Clicks titled ‘The Best Blog Metric” was rather thought provoking.
Paul’s take is to use his RSS statistics as a gauge of his blogs success. To extract a quote from his article:
……in my opinion 1 subscriber is worth way more than 1000’s of irrelevant uniques. If this blog were an e-commerce site 1 subscriber would be the equivalent to a sale.
I cannot help but agree with the last part of that statement, for a blog, each subscriber is the equivalent of a sale.
Take a step back and consider what a blog is. I may be wrong, however my interpretation of a blog is that it is a vehicle that enables me to broadcast information to the masses. However the masses have to want to view what I am broadcasting. A blog metric tool needs to be able to measure that desire.
I can have a thousand visitors in a day. How many actually stop and read and how many drop in and just as quickly drop out again? There are blog metric tools that measure things like bounce rates, length of stay and pages viewed. Those measurements are not really a measurement of the popularity of your blog. Return visitor rates would be but they are not as easy to measure.
The one measurement that is a good indicator of your blogs popularity is, as Paul Wright suggest, your RSS statistic. It takes a conscious effort to subscribe and you are only going to take that step if there is some attraction, or as I describe it, a desire to read.
Using a service such as Feedburner has the added benefit of providing a limited range of statistics. It also has the facility to value add to the feed with advertising and dedicated feed messages.
How do you measure the success of your blog? Is there a blog metric tool that you rely on? Are your RSS numbers an important indicator of your blogs success?
Category: Blog Metrics
Writing by Brick Marketing on Thursday, 21 of February , 2008 at 6:25 am
I often hear the term blog metrics, web metrics and even business metrics. At times I have to walk away wondering if the speaker really understands the concept behind the term blog metrics. The concept is very straight forward but I will start with some formal definitions.
Blog metrics can be defined as:
[source] Numbers used as a measurement for standard of quality for comparing different items or time periods. Visits, Unique Hosts, Goals, and Value are all fields that might be used as a metric.
[source] Any type of measurement. Metrics could include business results, quantification of system usage, average response time, benefits achieved, etc. The measures that an organization believes is vital for its success.
[source] Often used interchangeably with measurements. However, it may be helpful to separate these definitions. Metrics are the various parameters or ways of looking at a process that is to be measured. Metrics define what is to be measured.
The one thing that all three definitions have in common is the term ‘measurement’. However it is the last definition that interest me the most. Metrics, and let us take blog metrics as an example, ‘define what is to be measured’. It is the term ‘what’ that is of most interest.
We can spend all day measuring our blog. We can keep statistics on traffic, unique visitors, bounce rate, click through rate, average pages and/or the average time for each visitor. These are all measurements so you could classify them as blog metrics.
If we take the third definition then the term metrics is going to refer to ‘what’ we are going to measure and how we are going to measure it. As an example, if I decide to run a promotional to increase my newsletter subscription numbers then I know I have several parameters to measure. The dollars spent. The increase in traffic and of course, the actual number of sign-ups IÂ receive. You could argue (correctly too) that each one of these can be measured and there are blog metrics tools out there to measure them.
From my position, these numbers, whilst interesting, don’t go far enough. When I talk about blog metrics I am after the next level of data. The data that interests me is the cost per sign-up; the cost per hundred visitors; the conversion rate per 100 or per 1000 extra visitors. Blog metrics from my viewpoint is a tool that I can use to measure the effectiveness of what I am measuring, whether it is a promotion, a new affiliate ad unit on my blog or a new social site that I decide to target.
Blog metrics, in fact any form of metrics, is not just about measuring. It is about measuring the right factors to help you succeed. Again I quote from one of the definitions, metrics, blog metrics included, is ‘The measures that an organization believes is vital for its success’. I wonder, what is your definition of blog metrics?
Category: Blog Metrics
Writing by Brick Marketing on Friday, 1 of February , 2008 at 7:56 am
There are many blog metric tools out there, some free and some that cost a few dollars. I have become a little disillusioned with a lot of the measuring tools available. One reason for my dissatisfaction is the fact that each tool seems to return a different set of numbers. I find they are useful for measuring trends but not actual numbers.
Probably the best is the Google Analytics tools, however I find that even his tool doesn’t provide data that agrees with any other tool. Over time my reliance on any form of measurement including Page Rank has diminished to the point that I only look for curiosity and trends. If I want a real measurement of how well my sites are doing I use the one measurement tool that counts - the search engine.
I regularly take my keywords and run searches on each of them to see how well placed they are in the search results. After all, these are the results that matter most. Google Analytics does at least help to support the results I receive from my searches.
One tool I have come across, whilst not a blog metric tool, is SiteScan. Site Scan will scan all the pages on your site to determine whether or not your Google Analytics code is in place and being included in the analysis results.
Do you have a favorite blog metric or blog marketing tool? Is it accurate and reliable? Let me know if you do.
Category: Blog Metrics
Writing by Brick Marketing Staff on Thursday, 27 of December , 2007 at 11:50 pm
When it comes to blog metrics, there is more than one solution. For most bloggers, all you really need is Google Analytics. But there are two ways to put the code into your blog template so that you can use Google Analytics and measure your stats. The first way is to use the Google Analytics plugin for WordPress.
The Google Analytics plugin is the easy way. The upside to doing it this way is all you have to do is install the plugin, activate it, and insert your Google Analytics code. When you want to see your stats for your blog you just log in to your Google Analytics account the way you normally would and you can see all the usual stats.
The second way to use Google Analytics is slightly more complex. You do need to understand a little bit about modifying your templates and it’s a little dangerous because if you do it wrong then you can break your template. Still, the upside is that you don’t have to mess with a plugin and your code is cleaner as a result. It’s cleaner and will reduce your code-to-text content because each WordPress plugin comes complete with massive code. If you use the template modification method then the only additional code you have is the Google Analytics code itself.
To insert your Google Analytics into your WordPress template, follow this guide:
- Open up your FTP client and go to your templates folder
- Find the template that you are using for your blog and open that folder
- Transfer the php file for your index file into a folder on your hard drive so you can work with it
- Open the index.php file on your hard drive
- Somewhere between the body tags, preferably near the top of your page, insert your Google Analytics code
- Save the file to your hard drive and transfer it back to your blog template folder
There. Fairly simple. But be sure you place your Google Analytics code in the right place or it won’t work properly.
Category: Blog Metrics
Writing by Brick Marketing on Monday, 24 of December , 2007 at 10:36 pm
Choosing a domain name for your new blog is just one thing. There’s still the hosting, SEO, content, and design to think about. It’s important to tackle each and every issue if you are ready to start a new blog, whether corporate or personal. DailyBits’ Steven Ward wrote an interesting list of 8 Bad Decisions When Starting a Website. The items included in the list may seem basic but a lot of webmasters completely forget about them.
So here they are. I called them “8 No So Wise Decisions” because really, forgetting about them is just not so wise.
1. Free or Cheap Web Hosting. Low cost hosting will bring you to hell Frequent downtimes? Low bandwidth? Goodluck!
2. Not Buying a Domain Name. Read Why Domain Names Matter.
3. Not Getting the Right Domain Name. Review the 7 Highly Effective Domain-name Habits.
4. Designing Exclusively for Search Engines. SEO, SEO, and SEO. It’s all about optimization baby! Try to get noticed by Google.
5. Prioritizing the Look Over the Content. Content is still king. What’’s the point of having a really cool flash-based blog if your content is so-so?
6. Forgetting About the Target Market. On a niche? Stick to it.
7. Poor Navigation. Please, don’t confuse your readers with fancy navigations. It’s just pointless. Help them by pointing them to the right page easily.
8. Ineffective Keyword Targeting. As part of good optimization efforts, learn to target the right keywords.There are lots of keyword research tools out there that could help you find the more popular keywords.
Category: Blog Content, Blog Design, Blog Marketing, Blog Metrics, Blog SEO, Blog and Website Services, Blogging Tips
Writing by Brick Marketing on Sunday, 23 of December , 2007 at 10:21 pm
Still on the topic of domain names, have you ever wondered why domain names vary in price? Top level domains .com, .org. or .net’s are more expensive than .info, .biz, or country domains such as .us, .eu, or the newest .asia.
So why are some domain names more expensive than the others? One word : COMPETITION. People compete over the most common yet highly popular keywords like Sex, Business, or Diamond.
Truth to tell, there were domain names who were sold and bold as much as at $350 million!
Top 10 Most Expensive Domain Names :
10. Shop.com - sold for $3,500,000
9. Korea.com - $ 5,000,000 in January 2000
8. SEO.com - sold for $ 5,000,000 in June 2007
7. AsSeenOnTv.com - sold for $5,100,000 million in January 2000
6. Casino.com - sold for $5,500,000 million in 2003
5. Beer.com - sold for $7,000,000 million in 2004
4. Diamonds.com - sold for $7,500,000 million in 2006
3. Porn.com - sold for $9,500,000 million in 2007
2. Sex.com - sold for 14,000,000 million in January 2006
1. Business.com - sold for $350,000,000 million in 2007
(Source : Rhyan and Oylinki)
Domains tailing behind the list:AltaVista.com ($3,300,000) ; Vodka.com ($3,000,000) ; Loans.com ($3,000,000) ; Wine.com ($2,900,000), CreditCards.com ($2,750,000), Tom.com ($2,500,000), Autos.com ($2,200,000).
I’m not going to ask anymore why such and such were worth millions of dollars (enough to feed a small African country) because the reason is just obvious. Business is business—the more you spend, expect more in return.
Now, I wonder how much blogmarketingjournal.com is now worth?How much is your blog domain name worth? I guess it’s time for you to increase the market value of your blog. Or who knows, your domain is now worth a million dollars.
Category: Blog Metrics, Blog SEO, Blog and Website Services
Writing by Brick Marketing Staff on Sunday, 9 of December , 2007 at 12:37 pm
WebPosition 4 is a popular SEO Ranking software that I’d recommend, even if the only website you have is a blog. If you are trying to monetize your blog then you’ll need a way to track your conversions, right?
WebPosition 4 can do that and so much more.
Not only does WebPosition 4 track conversions, but it also reports your search engine rankings, helps you target your keywords better, uses a built-in expert to optimize your web pages more effectively, and submits your URLs to the search engines for you. It’s an automated process that is well worth the time.
There are two products that you might have an interest in: The standard edition and the professional. The standard edition is good if all you want to do is use a metrics system for your website or blog. But if you do any pay per click advertising at all then you’ll need the professional edition. The way it tracks and reports pay per click conversions is well worth the extra that you’ll spend on the professional edition.
The standard edition supports up to 5 domains, but the professional edition has unlimited domain support, so if you have multiple domains then you should think about shelling out the extra bucks for the professional edition. You can also have your reports e-mailed to you with the professional edition, which is a huge time saver. And two other new services that come with the professional edition are meta tag manager and link validation. I really like the link validation tool!
At any rate, before I go on too long, check out WebPosition 4. You’ll be glad you did.
Category: Blog Metrics, Blog and Website Services, Blogging Income, Blogging Tips
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