Today I want to feature an interview with Mehdi from Strong Lifts - a good example of a blog that is focusing upon a niche topic and growing a readership quickly over the last 12 months.
Tell us about your blog - what’s it about, why and when did you start it, who reads it?
StrongLifts.com is a blog about how to build muscle & lose fat through strength training. Topics include how to go from chubby to muscular, how to go from skinny to muscular, how to get stronger, how to perform exercises correctly, how to avoid injuries, how to improve your posture, how to eat healthier, etc
There are articles about body-weight exercises too, but the blog is mainly about weight lifting. It’s not bodybuilding: it’s not about working out for aesthetic purposes only. It’s about training to get stronger. This increases muscle mass, testosterone levels, cardiovascular fitness, strengthens bones & joints, lowers body fat, increases self-confidence, and much more.
I started StrongLifts.com for 2 reasons:
1) I was doing a job that wasn’t me for 5 years and had been looking for a way out. Summer 2006 someone sent me Steve Pavlina’s post how to make money blogging. I had never heard about blogs before, but this got me interested.
I looked for more info on blogging. Came across John Chow who got serious about blogging around the same time. I followed how his blog got big in a few months. This stuff seemed so easy, I decided to start a blog too.
Through John Chow I found Problogger. I printed the “blogging for beginners” series and studied everything (Darren is not paying me to say this. I don’t read Problogger anymore, but this really happened).
So my 1st reason was to start a blog that makes enough money to leave my day job. I wanted to be self-employed, and set the rules for myself. I knew I liked to teach people things, so blogging would fit. But I needed a topic.
2) I’ve been training for 10 years and often get questions about it. Friends, family, co-workers see how I look. They want the same thing. They’re often surprised I can eat so much without gaining fat by training 3-4x/week for 1 hour.
There’s a strong bias against weight lifting: unsafe, unhealthy, gets you bulky, etc. So you do other things like running, because “you have to exercise”. But you hate running. And that makes it very hard to do it consistently.
Be open minded, forget what you think you know about weight lifting and give it a try. You’ll never go back. Because once you try it, you’ll realize this stuff is so easy, it’s laughable. Whatever your age or gender.
Weight lifting & strength training made me who I am today. I believe everybody would be better off if they did it. That’s why I started StrongLifts.com: to give more people information on how they can easily build muscle & lose fat: like I do.
The guy with whom I started training 10y ago gave me idea to make a website about all of this in February 2007. StrongLifts.com went online May 1st 2007.
The majority of the 200k monthly visitors are males between 20 & 35y old. But there are females, teens and 55y old readers too. I remember getting an email from a 72y old guy who did Squats & Deadlifts and felt great.
Most readers are from the US, but there are readers from all over the world. What they all share is a willingness to change. To change their lifestyle, to live healthier, to be more active. It’s definitely not easy when you have a business, career, family, social life, … But where there’s a will, there’s a way.
Where does most of your traffic come from?
60% from search. I get a lot of traffic from Google. 10% is direct traffic. 13k RSS readers means a lot of readers will click back to the site to check comments, click link inside the articles, etc
The rest comes from social media & referrals. Digg doesn’t work well with my content, although I hit Digg front page once. Stumbleupon does better, I’ve had spikes of 3-4k visitors/day in the past.
I get daily inbound links from forums. Several articles are “flagship content” (I got that one from chrisg). Readers link to these articles to answer questions on relevant forums. This is targeted traffic.
Note that relying on Google for traffic is a bad business model. That’s why I focused on converting traffic to RSS from the start.
You’ve managed to build up your RSS readership to 13,000 in 12 months (it’s now 14,000) - that’s 1000 a month and a good strong rate - how did you do it?
Well it didn’t really went like that. StrongLifts.com went online May 1st 2007. It reached 1k RSS in November 2007. 5k in January 2008. 10k start of May 2008, ending the month at 14k. Check the graph below.
A lot of bloggers only care about generating traffic. Any business is about generating AND converting leads. I decided to convert traffic not to money, but to RSS. So I read & tried everything about how to increase RSS.
Most of the stuff I tried didn’t work for StrongLifts.com. Example: most traffic comes from google/forums. Often these readers don’t know what RSS is, they don’t know what the ticker stands for, neither what a blog is. They don’t know, because I didn’t know before I started a blog.
So these tips “put RSS high on your blog, put a big button, ask them to subscribe”, only works if your traffic consists of readers familiar with RSS (traffic from social media or blogs). I know this, because I tracked everything with google analytics.
But I still wanted to increase StrongLifts.com’s readership. So I thought about other ways for many weeks. Thinking outside the box, checking what other sites, non-blogs, did. Then the solution came pretty easy.
Check back the graph above. RSS started to increased mid-December 2007. That’s when I started to offer a 52 pages free ebook to anyone who subscribes. Since then I’ve optimized the sales letter, link placement, etc (use google analytics). It’s far from perfect, but RSS now increases by 3k/month. Which means I’ll reach 40k RSS by the end of the year. And that’s assuming the traffic doesn’t increase.
How do you make money from your blog? Is it your full time job? If not, is that a goal?
StrongLifts.com isn’t generating a full time income yet. I never, and still don’t, focus my efforts on making money. Building experience, building a reputation and building a readership is more important in the long-term. It’s easier to monetize a blog once you’ve built a foundation.
StrongLifts.com generates money through:
- Amazon & Affiliates. Products I own and recommend my readers get. Good things aren’t free. You learn faster reading books than reading blogs.
- Google Adsense. I have one block above the comments. Don’t want ads inside the content. It doesn’t make much money that way, but it also sends less traffic away from the blog. I’ll remove this in the future.
- Personal Training. Whatever business you’re in, you’re always selling something. Selling your own product is smarter than selling someone else’s. I started with personal training recently, not only for the money but because I enjoy it more than writing.
StrongLifts.com is my full time job. I worked 5 years in an IT helpdesk. Quit the job 12 days after the blog went online because:
- 5 years doing the same job was the limit.
- I couldn’t combine blogging with my day job.
- I wanted to burn my bridges.
Even though I lost a good income, I never regretted resigning. Regaining freedom and doing something I like mattered more than a paycheck. I couldn’t do what I to do today if I hadn’t done that job. But it was “time to move on”.
What’s the biggest blogging mistake you’ve made in the last 12 months and what did you learn from it?
Underestimating blogging. Although I got somewhere during the last 12 months, I thought it would be easier. Blogging is harder than it looks: copywriting, marketing, customer service, … You have to learn a lot of things.
I made a lot of other “mistakes”, but don’t really see them as such. Failure is part of the learning process. You have to make mistakes to get somewhere in life. “Failure is life’s best teacher” - Napoleon Hill.
What 3 things have contributed the most to the success you’ve had so far?
- Determination. I wasn’t going to “try”. I DECIDED I would become a blogger. Quitting my day job guaranteed I had no way back. When you REALLY want something, everything you need to get it comes your way. Including the answers to how to get there.
- Walking The Talk. I’ve been lifting weights since 10 years and still do. I’ve trained in commercial gyms and now own a home gym. I’ve combined lifting weights with working 2 jobs and night shifts. I’ve combined it with relationships and social life. I’ve been able to eat healthy on a tight budget. I’ve injured myself dozens of times. I’ve trained when ill and injured. I’ve trained after a night drinking alcohol or a 4 hour night sleep. You get the point. Readers sense I’m not bullshitting them. And they understand that a) it’s not meant to be easy b) you’ll never achieve perfection c) if I can do it, you can definitely do it too.
- Giving. Free articles, free ebook, free coaching, … Some people don’t like working for free. Truth is that you always get something back. Yes I’ve helped people who didn’t even say thank you. But I also had readers who optimized the blog and proofread the ebook for free because they felt they had to return the favor. But here’s what I always got back but what most people fail to realize: EXPERIENCE. You can lose your whole blog, you can lose all your money on your back account, but one thing no-one can ever take away from you: the knowledge & experience you’ve built by helping people. That is priceless.
Can you give ProBlogger readers 3 practical tips of what to do to grow their readership
- Write Good Content. Find out what people’s problems are. Give them the solution to their problems. How do you find this? 1) by walking the talk so you experience the same problems b) by interacting with your (potential) readers: friends, familiy, co-workers, forums, emails, comments, … Ideas are everywhere, you just have to pick them up.
- Guest Posts. Make a list of blogs with a high amount of readers and who often get on digg/del.icio.us/stumbleupon front page. If it’s a blog in the same niche, easy. If it’s a blog in a different niche: think outside the box (Example). Write a how-to post, your best one. Include relevant, non spammy back links to your own site, with anchor text optimized for search engine. Send the post to the blogger. Be blunt, don’t ask for permission “will you let me guest post”, just send the whole post, tell him to read it and publish it if he likes it with the only condition that he must keep the non-spammy relevant back links with anchor text. If you wrote a good post, every bloggers will say yes, because it’s like a day off. Hope it gets dugg, will get you back links (anchor text) from the blog and other blogs that copy-paste posts increasing long-term google ranking while creating short term traffic. If the blogger says no to the back links or to your post, send it to the next blogger on your list. Don’t give up, keep trying. If 5 bloggers say no, question your article.
- eBook. Write an eBook that has the solution to your readers problems. Give it away for free, but only after they subscribe by RSS (download link available through feedburner only). Mention you give away an ebook at the bottom of each post. Make a salesletter for the eBook. Track conversions using google analytics. Tweak it constantly.
What tips do you have for people who want to start a blog?
- Read. Knowledge is power. Throw your TV out and read everything you come across: copywriting, direct advertising, marketing, business, self-improvement, … Read 1 book per week and you’ll get ahead of 80% of the population.
- Believe. Watch out for The Crabs. Some people will tell you that you can’t do it, that you will never make money blogging, that you do not have the skills/knowledge to get there. Ignore them. Several people make money blogging, you could be the next one. No-one can tell you if you’ll succeed or not. It all depends on you. So want this and go for it.
- Don’t Do It for The Money. Blogging looks fun: waking up when you want, writing some blog posts, answering emails, making money online, … That’s indeed how it will look if you stick with it. But not during your first months. i’ve worked 70h on average during the past 12 months, and I’m not “there” yet. So if you’re looking for an easy way out of your day job or if you’re looking for easy money: don’t do it, because you have the wrong mindset and will fail. Blog about something you like, add value to the world, pay your dues. And yes one day you’ll get there.
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Written by Darren Rowse on May 22nd, 2008 with no comments.
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The smoke has barely cleared from all the gunfire and burnt rubber that is Grand Theft Auto IV as Metal Gear Solid 4, a potential-blockbuster game, looms over the horizon. Is this Christmas and all the mind-blowing games are coming out? Not at all. If you check your calendar, we haven’t even reached the mid-point of 2008 yet.
Same thing goes for the Video Games Channel. You’ve barely savored the latest that Ironic Gamer, Siliconera, or Play Girlz has to offer, and several newer entries get posted before you had a chance to blink. Even our blog launches behave similarly. One moment you see Gamerlite, our casual game blog, unveiled and next thing you know, Sega Nerds and Handheld Age are introduced.
We’re going full-speed ahead.
The entries I’ve gathered below are the latest that I’ve seen as of this writing, but don’t expect it to look the same a minute from now. Can you imagine what the list would look like if it were shown in real time?
Image of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is courtesy of Konami.
Tags:
game_blogs,
vgc,
video_games,
video_games_channel,
video_game_blogs
Written by Mike Leaño on May 22nd, 2008 with no comments.
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Today I’ve been checking out Andy Beal’s latest venture - Trackur.
Trackur is an online reputation monitoring tool that has been developed for companies and individuals wanting to take a serious look at what is being said about them in the blogosphere. I can also see the possibilities for using this tool for higher end bloggers who want to track what’s being written about them and/or their niche topic.
The best way to get a handle on Trackur and what it does is to signup for the free 14 day trial. The second best way to understand it is to watch Andy Demo Trackur in the following video.
There are of course free tools that you to monitor the blogosphere (including Google’s News Alerts and Technorati’s Watch Lists) but Trackur is a much more integrated package that is sure to appeal to a higher end user. You can see how it compares to Google News Alerts here:
The importance of such tools to bloggers is significant. Not only do they allow you to monitor what is being said about you and your company in the blogosphere - but to be able to set up tools to monitor when keywords in your niche are being mentioned is very important - particularly if you have a blog with a news focus.
Starting at $18 a month and ranging up to $188 a month I suspect that a lot of ProBlogger readers will stick with the free tools - however for those looking for a more feature rich package Trackur will be a real option.
PS: Speaking of Google News Alerts….
Just as I was writing this post an email hit my inbox with one of my News Alerts. I set up one for “Darren Rowse” and here’s what it sent me today (click to enlarge):
It’s great to get news results and blog results like this each day - however….
1. The first result (highlighted in green) is actually for a post written in May 2007
2. The second result (highlighted in red) is actually for a scraper site that picked up one of my own posts. What I find interesting is that Google News found the scraper site and ranked it and it didn’t find my own site’s version of that post. This is something I see every day in News Alerts - they attempt to cut out the duplicate content but in doing so seem to be promoting scraper versions instead of the original content.
3. Lastly I’m a little confused as to why they sent me an email with 5 search results for my name when their Blog Search Results for my name show 20 or so results in the last 24 hours.
Don’t get me wrong - Google News Alerts rock and are an important part of my own monitoring of keywords that are relevant to me - however they’re not perfect and I know they miss a lot and put up flunky results from time to time - I guess you get what you pay for.
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Written by Darren Rowse on May 22nd, 2008 with no comments.
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In the U.S. we are preparing for the official launch of summertime with our Memorial Day Holiday coming up this next weekend.
To welcome the most beloved season, b5media Lifestyles Channel decided to usher Summertime in with a very special tribute to The Good Old Summertime.
Mary Emma Allen at One Book Two Book reminds you to check our your local library for their summer reading programs which can be great fun for youngsters, parents, and grandparents.
Be gone foul wasp! Noreen Crone-Findlay at Hankering for Yarn has designed a crocheted fake wasp nest to trick the wasps and yellow jackets into staying away from her home. Let’s hope it works!
Elizabeth at Career and Kids shares tips for those busy potluck and picnic days at work and home. And on GenBetween she also shares 10 warm weather tips for aging adults.
Kadi Prescott of Supernanny Rules discusses the importance of continued learning during those long summer breaks from school.
Deborah Ng at Simply Thrifty paints a beautiful portrait of life as a kid in the 70’s in Queens with Dining Al Fresco in the Summers of My Youth.
Cyndi Lavin of Jewelry and Beading wants her readers to win a beautiful medallion, just in time for some summertime beading fun. On Layers Upon Layers you’ll learn some digital effects to give your summertime pictures some zip! And nothing beats crisp tangy salads for summertime eating. Busy Family Meals has a special salad dressing giveaway.
Heather at Chocolate Bytes has two recipes that say “summertime” to her first, chocolate zucchini cake and how about whipping up some Homemade Chocolate Ice Cream to top it off? If you hop over to The Food Bowl, she offers tips on heat stroke prevention for your pets.
Sherry at Inside Motherhood discusses taking her daughter to the market and explaining to her how it’s better to support locally grown farm foods rather than importing food as a bit of an educational field trip.
Christina at Solo Mother share’s a bit of a then and now as she discusses Sunday rituals as a child and those of today with her own child.
Maricar at Keeping the Castle shares a wonderful guest post by Jeff Wilson of the DIY Network where he discusses simple steps to an amazing deck makeover.
Karen at Thrifty Mommy shares two very popular classic posts - 15 Summer Cooking Tips and 10 Thrifty Ways to Deal with Mosquitos
Peggy at Junk Creation shares how to make a Vacation Scrapbook Planter from a Sour Cream Container.
Tracee at BlogFabulous shares a rather memorable experience during potty training. Any mother of boys will be able to relate to this one.
Katelyn from Stamping Mad has created a mixed media collage to remind herself to take time to enjoy the wonderful summer weather.
Farley at Behind the Vines is preparing for some summertime wine tasting. The only thing left to do is decide on a destination.
Sandy Mitchell at Robust Cooking shares 9 Quick Vegetable Grilling Tricks and if you hop over to her other blog All Holiday Cafe, she shares 10 Ways to Save Money on Summer Holiday Travel
Susan Gunelius at Play Library shares fond memories of her younger days spending hours in the family pool and flashes forward to today and the fun and affordable pool toys that are available.
Chloe Findlay-Harder at Tangled Thread shares a tutorial on how to make a cooling bandana to help relieve those super hot dog days of summer.
Linette Gerlach at Mother Earth’s Garden shares tips on Creating an Outdoor Space to escape to for relaxation and at She Knows Parties, Linette shares a Party Punch Decorative Ice Ring for a cool refreshing treat on a hot summer day.
Noel Bautista at Unplugged Living enlightens us on solar cooking options as an alternative to traditional grilling methods.
Last, at MomGadget, I take a stroll down memory lane as I list some of my personal favorite dishes and flavors of summertime. Almost the entire collection is a tribute to my grandmother who, summer after summer, taught me about tradition, gardening and the wonderful flavors Mother Nature provides us during the season.
We hope you’ve enjoyed our tribute to the wonderful season of summer and for our readers living in the U.S., we wish you all a wonderful and safe Memorial Day Holiday.
(image: stock.xchg)
Written by Gayla on May 22nd, 2008 with no comments.
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This is a guest post by Miles Baker.
Yesterday I noticed someone asking a question on a forum about how to organize all their affiliate login information. It reminded me of years ago, how I used to set up file folders and I would actually print out each page of login information and attempt to keep all my affiliate information in a giant filing cabinet. Of course, that was 10 years ago and much has changed since then, I hardly print out anything anymore. In fact, over the years I’ve been constantly refining my process of getting organized and keeping track of everything, and if you were to see my office you would be astounded how quickly I can find anything I could possibly need within less than a minute or two tops and how quickly I can get things done.
No matter who you are, even for a part-time affiliate there’s so much login information, passwords, bookmarks, todo-lists, receipts, emails, and other things to keep track of it can be completely overwhelming. Therefore, I thought I would share some of my best productivity tricks, tools, and methods with you that will help you get organized, keep everything in order, and save you countless hours and headaches!
First, you must have Roboform, if you aren’t using Roboform get it now! It keeps track of all your sites, all your login information, and you can also use it to store your address, credit card, and other information so when you go to buy something you click one button and the entire checkout form is filled out for you. I have over 400 logins in mine, and it definitely beats my old file folders and mountain of paper! I can’t even imagine how much time this one tool has saved me over the years.
Another program I’ve recently feel in love with is called Linkman. It’s a bookmarking tool that resides on your own PC. I used to love and recommend FURL, which did a lot of what Linkman does online, but after they were acquired by another company the site got so sloppy and slow, it’s now more trouble than it’s worth to bookmark something or find what you are looking for with it. So let me give you the rundown on Linkman. I use this tool to build my own Google essentially. I bookmark any site I think I may want to return to in the future, then I give that bookmark a quick set of tags. Let’s say I am going to bookmark SuperAffiliateMindset.com. I would bookmark the site, throw it into a category I’ve created, and then tag it with “amit, mehta, affiliate, marketing, super affiliate, mindset, blog, tips, adwords, ppc, lifetyle”. Now whenever I want to find something I can type in any one of those terms and my bookmarked site comes right up! It’s my own, ever-growing personal database of sites, and whenever I want to find something I click on the little icon in my system tray, type in a couple of words and it’s instantaneously ready for me!
So now that you’ve got your bookmarks in order, and all your passwords and login information, let’s talk about email. This is probably one of the largest, most unorganized messes people have on their PC. I use Thunderbird and by itself it’s a great email client, but it’s the add-ons that give this program possibilities and flexibility beyond any other email client I’ve ever used. Without getting into too much detail and writing 5 other articles, here’s a quick list of the add-ons I use to help productivity and organization…
- XNote - This is an awesome add-on as it allows you to add sticky notes to your emails. I use my email inbox as a partial todo/action box. What I do is I archive/filter all emails out of my inbox and leave only emails that require action. Then I use XNote to add any notes to either help remind me or add information to the email. I used to forget that certain emails were waiting on a reply or what an email was regarding, not anymore with Xnote.
- Archive - Since I get rid of everything in my inbox as fast as I can, anything I want to keep I archive. I use this add-on to add a button to the top of Firefox and then when I get an email I don’t need to do anything with but would like to keep I click the ‘Archive’ button. Much like Gmail works, however an added benefit is if you have multiple accounts you can archive to different folders.
- QuickText Pro - This is the Big Daddy of Thunderbird Add-ons when it comes to productivity. Use this to create email templates that you can use with the click of a button. What’s REALLY cool about QuickText Pro is that you can create a template with variables. For example, you can click a button, it will bring up a prompt for any variable, you fill in the information like a name or something, then it creates the rest of the email. For more details check out their site, I highly recommend this time saving tool.
- Tags - Thunderbird comes with Tags that you can customize so techincally this isn’t an add-on but an existing feature. Anyway, a good example of how I use tags is for my affiliate sales. I am an affiliate for tons of affiliate programs, ebooks, software, etc. that only make me sales sporadically. I filter all those sale notification emails into a separate folder called “Affiliate Sales”, and then when they come in I tag them with an ‘Unpaid’ tag so I know I should be expecting a payment for that. I also use tags for emails that I am waiting for on a reply on, among other things.
These add-ons are all fantastic, but don’t forget, no matter what email client you use, you should be sorting emails into folders and using filters to put email into its proper place. Also, turn off any features that notify you of new messages, either sounds or pop-ups, they are only distractions.
So now let’s talk about organizing your business. I personally love to write/type everything down that’s in my head, anything that I want or need to do. I even have a list of future blog posts that I keep so whenever an idea comes to me I write it down, then forget about it until I’m going to write on my blog. I find by getting everything out of my mind and into the computer let’s my mind relax and focus, and I never have to try and remember anything.
I use an AWESOME program for organizing everything I need to do. It’s called Swift ToDo List Pro, and it’s incredible. You can organize different todo lists, I organize mine by site or project. In addition to that, you can add notes to each task, attach files, include links with it, etc. You can organize your lists in a variety of ways, but what I find important is just having everything that needs to be done organized and remembered for me. It’s by far the most productive and time-saving tool I use, and it’s helped me to remember so many things I normally would have forgotten about it.
So there you have it. Use these tools to save time, be more productive, and get organized. I guarantee that using these tools will make your business move faster, and you’ll find yourself getting much more accomplished in less time.
Miles Baker is a 10 year Internet marketing veteran and full-time affiliate marketer. For more information on him visit his website MarketingWithMiles.com
Written by Miles on May 22nd, 2008 with no comments.
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Just like most Robert Scoble endeavors, the leadup takes forever and then there’s no content. [Source: Valleywag]
Written by Aaron Brazell on May 22nd, 2008 with no comments.
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What statistics do you monitor in Google Analytics?
I’ve written before on some of the statistics that I monitor on my blogs but one that I didn’t include is to look at the traffic coming in from Search Engines over time.
Here’s one of my favorite ways to get a quick overview of whether my blog is on the rise or not with regards to traffic from Search Engines.
The above graph (click to enlarge) is generated in Google Analytics and compares traffic from search engines to Digital Photography School (just the blog, not the forum) over the last two months.
The last 30 day period is the blue line and the month before that is the green line.
This graph immediately tells me that traffic is up from search engines over the last month.
The screen shot above (click to enlarge) shows that Search Engine traffic is up by 12.85% and also highlights where the rises in traffic have come from over the two periods (as well as other information between the two periods like the bounce rate, average time on site, pages visited per visitor etc).
How do you get this graph and information?
Here’s a quick step by step process (to do this you need to have run Google Analytics for at least two months).
1. Log into your Google Analytics account
2. In the left hand menu click ‘Traffic Sources’
3. Then select ‘Search Engines’ in the sub menu that opens up
4. This will open up the last month of your Search Engine traffic with a graph.
5. On the right hand side of your screen and towards the top you’ll see the date range of the last month. Click this open to get to this screen.
6. In that box you’ll see a ‘Comparison’ drop down menu. Click on the ‘Date Range’ option.
7. You can leave the blue date range as is - but with the 2nd date range (green) select the dates you want to compare. Then click ‘Apply’.
Note: I always choose dates that correspond to the days of the week chosen in the 1st (blue) date range. If the blue date range starts on a Sunday and ends on a Monday make the green range start on Sunday and end on Monday too.
While this leaves a few days not charted in between the date ranges it means that you’re comparing days of the week with the same days of the week in the two months. This makes it easier to see the comparison as the graph will usually rise and fall in the same pattern.
You now can see how the two month’s compare. This is where my analysis often stops as it gives me a snapshot view of how things are going. But from this point there are any number of ways to drill down further including:
Drilling Down Further
You can drill down further to see a graph for each search engine by scrolling down the page a little and clicking on one of the links of the search engine you want to compare over the two months.
This will take you to a page where you can see just the comparison in what traffic Google, or Yahoo might have brought. For example clicking on the Google stats takes me to a graph like this (similar to the above one as Google is my major source of SE traffic):
Once on this page there’s more interesting insights to be had as they allow you to see your top keywords. For example I can see the comparison for the search term ‘DSLR’ for the two months which has seen a 17.03% increase in traffic as a result of people searching for that term.
If I click on the ‘dslr’ link I can even see a graph of the two months again and the traffic for each day of the week for that particular keyword.
This is useful if you’ve been optimizing a particular word or just simply to analyze one search result might have been having a significant shift. I now have some hints on a keyword that I might want to optimize a little better now.
There are literally hundreds of threads of statistics that Google Analytics can provide you with. This is just one of my favorites. How do you use it to provide you with interesting and more importantly useful information on your blog and how it’s going?
PS: Here’s another fun comparison for those of you who have been using Google Analytics for a longer period of time. Use the same process outlined above to compare longer periods of traffic. For example - here’s my overall traffic at DPS from the first five months of this year as compared to the first five months of last year:
There might not be a lot to glean from this graph - but it sure is motivating to look where you’ve come from - it’s a 94% increase. Something to motivate me for the next 12 months!
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Written by Darren Rowse on May 21st, 2008 with no comments.
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In last week’s video I examined 5 Emerging Trends in blogging. A few readers emailed to say that while they agreed with the trends I had identified that they felt a little overwhelmed by them and not equipped to embrace the trends on their own blogs. They were concerned that they were too far behind the big blogs and said that they felt like giving up.
The emails reminded me of some of my own feelings when I started blogging. While I started out five years ago - at the time I remember feeling like I was too late to the medium. Other bloggers seemed like they were so much more advanced and in my lower moments I wondered if there was any point in blogging on.
In this video I want to balance the 5 emerging trends in blogging with 2 things that haven’t really changed in blogging - things that I don’t seem going away any time soon. While the trends are worth keeping an eye on don’t lose sight of the basics - the things that don’t change!
See the full sized video on YouTube, MySpace, Revver, Blip.tv and Viddler
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Written by Darren Rowse on May 21st, 2008 with no comments.
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Today Jeremy Schoemaker from ShoeMoney shares the Tipping Point for his blog.
When I decided to start quantifying what I was talking about by posting some of our earnings it was a HUGE influx of users. Especially the adsense check and Azoogleads check (which was for a magazine not a real check).
Many blogs talk in theories but very few are willing to, or have the ability to quantify their theories.
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Written by Darren Rowse on May 21st, 2008 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized.
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