Another Powerful Tool For Bloggers: Google Analytics Part I: Overview

Another tool I find useful alone with my Sitemeter dot com subscription is Google Analytics. Google Analytics provides you with detailed information about the visitors coming to your blog. After taking the Sitemeter dot com tour for the premium subscription, I have found that Google Analytics offers much of the same for FREE. Like Sitemeter, you insert code onto every page you want to have analyzed and tracked.

What are these cool features?

The first piece of date you see as soon as you log into Google analytics is a bar graph that tracks your blogs visitors. I like it because you can visually see the ups and downs of visitors to your blog. Like Sitemeter dot com, you can see the number of visits, pages per visit, bounce rate, number of page views, average time on the site, and percent of new visitors. All of these are very valuable bits of information that allow you to see where you need improvement in your blog. From the dashboard screen, you can gather further information about your visitors, traffic sources, content, and information about your goals.

Google Analytics Overall:

Overall, I think Google analytics can be one of the most valuable tools to a blogger. It gives you a variety of ways to gauge the effectiveness of your blog, all for free. However it doesn’t tell you how to improve upon your site, but I guess that’s why you’re here. The site is a bit confusing at first, and takes some time to learn to navigate it. But after you get the hang of it, you’ll agree with me that its one of the most valuable tools a blogger has in his arsenal!

The Most Expensive Home In The World For Sale

I found a video of the most expensive home for sale. The house is better described as a mansion. In 50,000 square feeet you have 24 bedrooms, 23 bathrooms, 6 dining rooms, 5 marble garages, 5 swimming pools, 4 kitchens, and 3 elevators. But thats not all. One room in the house is 24 karot gold worth an estimated $400,000. Thats more than alot of homes! For entertainment inside, there is a squash court, movie theatre, and a bowling alley. For you outdoor entertainment, there is a Astroturf tennis court that doubles as a futbol pitch and horse stables. The marble driveway is even heated! And if you don't feel like traveling by car, no worries, there is area that can turned into a heliport! If you're asking yourself how much this all costs, you can't afford it. Don't worry though, this home is out the price range for most millionaires! The asking price for this magnificent home is $140 million dollars! And guess what? The money you have to shell out doesn't stop here. It costs about $2 million per year for upkeep. Check out the video and comment your thoughts about the home.

A Powerful Tool For Your Blog: Sitemeter Dot Com

The first application I added to this blog was a tracking script from Sitemeter dot com. There are two different subscriptions available from Sitemeter: basic (free) and premium (paid – starting at $6.95 per month). I opted for the basic subscription at this point in time. I may opt to upgrade to premium in the future, but paying for features right now would be against my idea for this blog: starting with nothing and building a powerful source of income that covers it own related charges. One of the major tools of premium edition I’ve seen is the ability to track visitors with an invisibly. I’m sure theres some other cool things in there, but at this point I haven’t really reviewed it.

I would recommend starting out with the basic subscription either way to get a feel for how the entire system works. And don’t get me wrong, Sitemeter basic is a powerful tool you can put to use from the very beginning of your blogging ventures. Sitemeter basic provides statistics such: the total number of visitors and page views, average visits and page views per day, average visit length, average page views per visit, and the number visits and page views in the last hour, day, and week. It even shows you the geographical location of readers! One feature I find especially interesting is ability to see out-clicks of your visitors. Out-clicks are the last page viewed before a reader left your blog. How is this helpful? It allows you to see what content that turned away a reader and gives you the opportunity to fix up a post to yield better reader retention.

I recommend the addition of Sitemeter to your blog for its ease of tracking visitors. Theres more features inside, so what are you waiting for? Get it on your blog today!

Whats In A Name?

One of the single most important features that makes a blog unique is a name, so it’s not surprising that coming up with a catchy name is a daunting task. I’m sure each blogger out there has a story on how he or she came up with their name. Feel free to take their advice on how they found in a fortune cookie, but remember this: the name of the site is the first thing a reader sees and uses to make a judgement about your blog or not. If appropriate for the type of site, use your own name as the dot com. It conveys a more personal feeling to the reader. It shows that blogger isn’t afraid to say “this is my work.” It shows CONFIDENCE. On the other hand, there are times when using your name is not appropriate or even an option (maybe it's already registered). This is where coming up with a name becomes a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s actually quite simple. Take out a piece of paper or open a new notepad file up and jot down everything thing that comes to mind about your chosen topic. From this list you can begin to construct your very own unique name! However, there are two things you will want to keep in mind.

• You want your name to be short and concise. The more people need to type, the more room for errors. Anything too long readers will forget (Exactly what you don’t need!). After all, there is a reason why your phone number is seven digits long.
  
• Choose a name that is catchy. This makes it easier for the reader to remember resulting in repeat visits.

Hooray! We've successfully came up with a way to make coming up with a name a lot easier resulting in more time to spend on the most important part of the site; the content!

A Blog Without Goals Is A Blog Without Results

What’s the number one reason a new blog ends prematurely? Times up. It was kind of a trick question anyways, because there are three but they are interrelated: (1) trying to do much and becoming overwhelmed, (2) a lack of (unrealistic) goals, and (3) only writing about a particular topic only for monetary reasons. We’re all guilty of it, because lets face it; the desire to make money is human nature. I, for one, know I’m guilty of this. A long time ago, I started a blog about cell phones because I believed there was a great potential for income from the dot com (see reason #3). I didn’t have a great deal of interest in the subject, but I figured ‘what the hell, once it’s making money for me I’ll learn to love it.’ The first month I cranked out posts with varying amounts per day and with little direction. I even monetized the site, but by the end of the first month I accumulated a little over $1. I put in all this work and got nothing out of it, and soon became overwhelmed with the entire project (see reason #1). Why did this happen? I set my sights too high; I was expecting to make $50+ in the first month and be making bazillions in no time (see reason #2). As you can easily see, my goals were unrealistic and my reasons for the blog were purely monetary and as result I became overwhelmed quite quickly. In order to correct my mistakes, lets look take a look at my first road to success.

The Solution:

You’ve seen the solution to these problems hundreds, if not thousands of times on the web. Choose a topic you’re passionate about! Before you begin your venture of making money on the web, take some time and write down your favorite topics or even something that interests you that you WANT to learn about. When you start out, don’t kill yourself putting up 50 posts a day. You won’t be able to keep this pace, and for heavens sake, don’t worry about money yet! If you have no or a few post and little if any visitors, how do you expect to earn any money??? At this point, getting traffic to your blog is the most important issue. Right now I’d love to have 1000 visitors by end of the month. That would be about 33-34 visitors per day. Guess what, this first month I’m probably not going to get that. 1000 visitors by the end of the month would be an unrealistic goal. Hell, I’m not sure if I’ll get 500 visitors in the first month, but I think 250 visitors (about 8-9 visitors per day) is realistic. So, I’m going to set a goal of 250 to 500 visitors by the end of the month. I’m not going to go overboard with my posts either. I’m going to shoot to add 1 solid post per day for the next month about a topic I am very passionate about: Making Money Online! I have more goals in mind, but they’re not appropriate at this point in time, but in the mean time make yourself some realistic goals in a realistic time period, and see how much accomplished you feel when you reach your goals!

The Journey Into The Unknown: The Beginning Of A Weblog (Blog)

Everyone knows you can make a ton of money online. The only problem is that people don't exactly know how to go about that. Everyday we see scams that appeal to our desire to "make money quick" while promising very little work needed. Now I don't know about you, but everything I've wanted in life, I've had to work for. There's "no easy money," and f there was, we'd all have it, which brings me to the entire idea of this blog: to teach you how to make money step by step (sort of like a case study). You'll see how a blog goes from being a no body to a somebody. I'll test various techniques to see what works, and what to throw in the garbage to save you time and energy and maximize your blogs earning potential, and I’ll throw in some interesting postings to spice things up once in a while. This isn't one of those blogs from guys who already have major dot coms and are attempting to convince YOU making money is easy, like John Chow. Their job is easy because they already have the large readership prior to beginning their blogs, let alone the ability to get a multitude of quality links. Having a blog that makes thousands of dollars a month after one to two months is unrealistic, so why are YOU listening to these guys?