Is your blog outperforming your expectations?
Every marketing strategy needs reviewed every once in a while. You'll need to tweak, to adjust, and most of all, lose the bits that you're getting nothing from.
Step One: Keep Track of Your Blog Results
Tracking your blogs stats is as simple as ABC.
First though, you've got to work out what you want to track. Do you want to track your traffic? Do you care more about comments? How about what you're earning...
Primary goal – traffic
Keeping track of your traffic is as easy as finding a stats program you like and using it. There's a great one built into cpanel called Awstats, or you could use http://analytics.google.com
Either way, you have to understand how to read the statistics.
Awstats is reasonably easy to understand – the most important two numbers in it are the unique visitors and your page views. You might also want to see who is bookmarking you – in the sense of coming back to visit you using a simple 'bookmark me' function in their browser.
Bookmarking beyond the simple 'favourite' concept.
Favouriting a site, or bookmarking it, is the act of saving the URL in a list that you can then access from a menu in your browser. But in recent years there's also been another way to bookmark a site – and that way is interestingly, to drive boatloads of traffic to your site, if used correctly.
Its most important to remember that this form of 'bookmarking' was initially based on the browser based lists we keep on our own pc's – designed around allowing you to 'share' your favourites with others.
And then sites like Digg, Technorati and Delicious sprung up, giving people a broad range of ways to mark out the best items in another blog – sharing it, with everyone that's interested in the niche of the bookmarked blogs. If you're using social bookmarking, you should also try to keep track of roughly how well it’s working out for you – how many 'diggs' you're receiving, how much traffic its referring in. You should be able to see that in your stats too, by looking for url's that refer from the sites that you're bookmarked on. If your website stats are doing their job, they WILL track this.
Once you know how well your traffic is performing, you can decide which content is driving the BEST traffic. If you've got a goal for your blog, be it making money, referrals, or simply driving traffic to your other site, you can use your traffic (and affiliate stats/earnings) to find out which posts are drawing the most traffic and work on extending on those results.
One month in, you should have several 'cornerstone' posts that define the whole concept of your blog – giving your readers several strong posts that give both the tone and nature of your blog. These cornerstone posts should be among your strongest performing posts, or you should work on making a couple of stronger ones. These cornerstone posts can also be used, one month in (to give them plenty of time to index in search engines), as articles in sites like http://ezinearticles.com – giving you even MORE traffic coming in from relevant sites.
Advanced techniques
FeedBurner
FeedBurner is a great way to add additional options to your site, not limited to subscription boxes, portable feed results, reposting of your information (for example, syndicating your articles is possible just by giving people your FeedBurner code. Their site updates automatically, and you control where they are clicking through to if they are interested in what you are saying in your articles. Its win – win).
FeedBurner was recently bought out by Google, giving you several amazing new options – including opening up their Pro services.
Most people use a lot of the FeedBurner functions, so its highly recommended that you grab your own account and explore.
Advanced techniques with FeedBurner also include the ability to 'fix' feeds so that they are readable, and track your feed stats.
Once you've set up your feed in FeedBurner keep the URL handy.
Aweber
If you've fed your Blogger atom feed through FeedBurner this will also work, but Wordpress has feeds that work well with one of the most amazing things that Aweber offers for bloggers, and one of the main reasons I use Aweber.
Aweber has a facility that allows you to attach your blog feed to your email list, giving you the opportunity to email your list the instant you update your blog. This is a great way to automate some of your posting process. And all it takes is filling in a form in Aweber, and putting a subscription form on your site. Not so advanced really.
You'll also be able to set up a template for your posts at the same time – you can choose one of dozens of templates that can compliment your site.
There is in fact, only one caveat to all of this.
If you post multiple times a day, you run the risk of annoying people – and if you don't post enough, your 'newsletters' may not be issued often enough. So you've got to set it up to post at regular intervals, which is where this gets slightly complicated.
Optimal posting is once a week – BUT...if you've got time critical information, this might not work out well for you.
So, you need to work out how to get Aweber to send out an email once a week – if your average posting schedule is three posts a week, set it up to post your information every four posts – add one to your week's post UNLESS you only post once a week – in which case, set it to send once per week.
You'll also still be able to send 'broadcasts' announcing any time critical information – and you'll STILL be able to set up your auto responses to your list – effectively offering you 'triple duty' on your autoresponders.
Other autoresponders may not offer this service so you'll need to check with them.
If your business is more list driven than blog driven, you can also take your list and post it to your blog. You'll need to find a plugin that works with your program – and this does not (as far as I'm aware) work with Blogger.
Trackbacks
There are more ways than one to pay regard to a good blogger – if you're linking to – or someone is linking to you, MOST blogs will track this.
Its called 'tracking back' – or backlinking in blogger – or, sometimes even pinging.
It is the art of linking back to a blog that you've read, and referenced – but more than that, its a way to get an effortless link BACK from a blog that YOU read, as long as they accept trackbacks.
Its an advanced technique, because you can't just 'trackback' to from any post – its important to choose only one, two or at a maximum, three blog posts to link back to.
When linking back, you have to use a special link, in the case of WordPress, its simply got 'trackback' on the end.
You use the 'regular' link in the post – this 'regular' link would be exactly the same one as you use to access the single post – you then put /trackback/ on the end of this, and place it in the box designated trackbacks.
As far as I'm aware, Blogger has no option to do this, but might automatically post them.
No matter what you do with your blog, you'll always find that you can get more traffic, more interest, and more eyeballs to your site with a blog.
And no matter how you work on your blog, if you follow our pattern, you'll find that in a month you can make a huge impact on your website.
“To Your Greater Success”
Every marketing strategy needs reviewed every once in a while. You'll need to tweak, to adjust, and most of all, lose the bits that you're getting nothing from.
Step One: Keep Track of Your Blog Results
Tracking your blogs stats is as simple as ABC.
First though, you've got to work out what you want to track. Do you want to track your traffic? Do you care more about comments? How about what you're earning...
Primary goal – traffic
Keeping track of your traffic is as easy as finding a stats program you like and using it. There's a great one built into cpanel called Awstats, or you could use http://analytics.google.com
Either way, you have to understand how to read the statistics.
Awstats is reasonably easy to understand – the most important two numbers in it are the unique visitors and your page views. You might also want to see who is bookmarking you – in the sense of coming back to visit you using a simple 'bookmark me' function in their browser.
Bookmarking beyond the simple 'favourite' concept.
Favouriting a site, or bookmarking it, is the act of saving the URL in a list that you can then access from a menu in your browser. But in recent years there's also been another way to bookmark a site – and that way is interestingly, to drive boatloads of traffic to your site, if used correctly.
Its most important to remember that this form of 'bookmarking' was initially based on the browser based lists we keep on our own pc's – designed around allowing you to 'share' your favourites with others.
And then sites like Digg, Technorati and Delicious sprung up, giving people a broad range of ways to mark out the best items in another blog – sharing it, with everyone that's interested in the niche of the bookmarked blogs. If you're using social bookmarking, you should also try to keep track of roughly how well it’s working out for you – how many 'diggs' you're receiving, how much traffic its referring in. You should be able to see that in your stats too, by looking for url's that refer from the sites that you're bookmarked on. If your website stats are doing their job, they WILL track this.
Once you know how well your traffic is performing, you can decide which content is driving the BEST traffic. If you've got a goal for your blog, be it making money, referrals, or simply driving traffic to your other site, you can use your traffic (and affiliate stats/earnings) to find out which posts are drawing the most traffic and work on extending on those results.
One month in, you should have several 'cornerstone' posts that define the whole concept of your blog – giving your readers several strong posts that give both the tone and nature of your blog. These cornerstone posts should be among your strongest performing posts, or you should work on making a couple of stronger ones. These cornerstone posts can also be used, one month in (to give them plenty of time to index in search engines), as articles in sites like http://ezinearticles.com – giving you even MORE traffic coming in from relevant sites.
Advanced techniques
FeedBurner
FeedBurner is a great way to add additional options to your site, not limited to subscription boxes, portable feed results, reposting of your information (for example, syndicating your articles is possible just by giving people your FeedBurner code. Their site updates automatically, and you control where they are clicking through to if they are interested in what you are saying in your articles. Its win – win).
FeedBurner was recently bought out by Google, giving you several amazing new options – including opening up their Pro services.
Most people use a lot of the FeedBurner functions, so its highly recommended that you grab your own account and explore.
Advanced techniques with FeedBurner also include the ability to 'fix' feeds so that they are readable, and track your feed stats.
Once you've set up your feed in FeedBurner keep the URL handy.
Aweber
If you've fed your Blogger atom feed through FeedBurner this will also work, but Wordpress has feeds that work well with one of the most amazing things that Aweber offers for bloggers, and one of the main reasons I use Aweber.
Aweber has a facility that allows you to attach your blog feed to your email list, giving you the opportunity to email your list the instant you update your blog. This is a great way to automate some of your posting process. And all it takes is filling in a form in Aweber, and putting a subscription form on your site. Not so advanced really.
You'll also be able to set up a template for your posts at the same time – you can choose one of dozens of templates that can compliment your site.
There is in fact, only one caveat to all of this.
If you post multiple times a day, you run the risk of annoying people – and if you don't post enough, your 'newsletters' may not be issued often enough. So you've got to set it up to post at regular intervals, which is where this gets slightly complicated.
Optimal posting is once a week – BUT...if you've got time critical information, this might not work out well for you.
So, you need to work out how to get Aweber to send out an email once a week – if your average posting schedule is three posts a week, set it up to post your information every four posts – add one to your week's post UNLESS you only post once a week – in which case, set it to send once per week.
You'll also still be able to send 'broadcasts' announcing any time critical information – and you'll STILL be able to set up your auto responses to your list – effectively offering you 'triple duty' on your autoresponders.
Other autoresponders may not offer this service so you'll need to check with them.
If your business is more list driven than blog driven, you can also take your list and post it to your blog. You'll need to find a plugin that works with your program – and this does not (as far as I'm aware) work with Blogger.
Trackbacks
There are more ways than one to pay regard to a good blogger – if you're linking to – or someone is linking to you, MOST blogs will track this.
Its called 'tracking back' – or backlinking in blogger – or, sometimes even pinging.
It is the art of linking back to a blog that you've read, and referenced – but more than that, its a way to get an effortless link BACK from a blog that YOU read, as long as they accept trackbacks.
Its an advanced technique, because you can't just 'trackback' to from any post – its important to choose only one, two or at a maximum, three blog posts to link back to.
When linking back, you have to use a special link, in the case of WordPress, its simply got 'trackback' on the end.
You use the 'regular' link in the post – this 'regular' link would be exactly the same one as you use to access the single post – you then put /trackback/ on the end of this, and place it in the box designated trackbacks.
As far as I'm aware, Blogger has no option to do this, but might automatically post them.
No matter what you do with your blog, you'll always find that you can get more traffic, more interest, and more eyeballs to your site with a blog.
And no matter how you work on your blog, if you follow our pattern, you'll find that in a month you can make a huge impact on your website.
“To Your Greater Success”
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