How To Reduce Blogging Stress

Gone are those days when people used to blog just for fun or as a hobby. Today large number of people blog professionally. A good number of them are maintaining multiple blogs with large reader base. This has given birth to stress problem among bloggers due to tight blogging schedules to meet the expectations of their readers. How to deal with this situation to get maximum output without putting much burden on ourselves?

Choose Your Blog's Niche Wisely

It is often observed that the biggest factor responsible for stress is - "struggle for creating new and fresh content for the blog". A couple of readers emailed me about this situation, where they have created a blog but struggle to get new ideas for fresh content, leading to stress and depression. The solution to this problem is very simple. Choose your blog's niche wisely right from the beginning. If you love web designing, create a blog about it. If you are creating a blog on a topic that you love to talk, write and discuss about, you will never fall short of ideas. This will automatically remove any stress related to this situation.

Don't Set Unrealistic Goals

New year comes and you are ready to make resolutions. There is nothing wrong in it, and in fact they give a reason to work hard and to achieve our goals. But what if we try to set very high goals that are unachievable in a given time frame. Problem gets graver when a blogger knows about these unrealistic goals and still strive hard to achieve them. This leads to depression and frustration. You very well know your limitations and caliber. Do not blindly follow your peer's resolutions. If he is setting a goal of getting 2000 new subscribers, you should not try to emulate him. Analyze, study and do some research about your traffic growth, visitors behavior and subscription growth. Once you have collected all the data, calculate and set a reasonable target.

Create Blogging Schedule

Create a timetable dividing it into slices reserving appropriate time for content creation, social media marketing, replying to comments and mails, search engine optimization and general maintenance of your blog. Always allocate the usual office hours for maximum output. Late night and unusual hours are only going to aggravate the problem further.

Socialize With Peers

This is one of the best methods to reduce blogging stress. Socializing with like minded people not only give mental stimulus but also helps in getting new ideas and resources to improve your blogging skills.

Automate Tasks

Wherever possible try to automate the tasks to reduce the burden. For example, welcoming new followers on twitter, comment moderation (common akismet take cares of 99.99% spam), scheduling of posts, canned reply to general queries of readers and so on. This can save huge time for other important stuff giving you peace of mind.

Take Complete Break Once A Week

Reserve one day in a week to take complete break from blogging. Spend time with your family or friends. This is the best stress buster that will rejuvenate your mind and body giving you fresh energy for the next week. You can plan a dinner, a movie, a concert or just a stroll to nearby park with your spouse.

Over To You

Have you undergone similar situation before? How you cope with this kind of situation?

Continue Reading

0 comments - By Rajeev Edmonds - Digg This

Reducing Ad Blindness: Rotating Ad Colors For Adsense

'Ad Blindness' is a phenomenon in which visitors consciously ignores the presence of advertisements on a web page. This leads to reduced click through rate (CTR) and affects your earnings. If large chunk of your visitors are returning visitors and if you have not done anything to prevent this phenomenon, you can loose significant amount of your earnings. Let's see how to deal with this situation by some simple palette rotation tricks.

I still remember when I first started using Digg. In the beginning, I used to pay attention on the top right rectangular ad on the home page of Digg. Gradually I completely forgot the presence of this ad. This is called 'Ad Blindness'. Now it only attracts my attention, when some new sparkling ad is placed there. So, the solution lies in constant change of ads.

Change Is Good

How about taking same porch egg in breakfast for years without any change in the menu? And what if you get same boring TV episode week after week without any break? Not feeling good? It's a common human tendency to ask for change when we talk of consumable goods. That's why companies roll out new and multiple color models of their products. Same rule applies to advertisements on our blog.

Palette Rotation: The Key Is In Your Hands

Ad palette rotation works on a simple principle. Every time a web page is refreshed, a new ad with different color combination is served to the reader. This catches the attention of the visitor and clicking probability increases dramatically. Let's see how to implement this technique with Adsense advertisements.

Creating a multiple palette Adsense ad

For creating a muli-color rotating ad in Adsense, go to 'Adsense for Content' and select the 'Ad Type'. Once you reach the 'Choose Ad Format and Colors' option, select the 'Use multiple palettes...' option from the 'Palettes' drop down menu.

Hold 'Ctrl' key and select up to 4 different palettes. If you want, you can choose just two or three palettes. It is always advised to choose all the available 4 palettes for maximum benefit.

Once you have selected all the palettes, you can see its preview as shown above in the example. In this example, we can see 4 different palettes that have been chosen for a single ad. All these palettes will be used by the ad in round robin fashion on subsequent refreshing of web page. It means, if a visitor refreshes the page 4 times, he will see different color ad one after another from these 4 palettes. This will automatically divert his attention to this change and clicking probability will increase.

Be Careful

Sometimes, newbies overdo in enthusiasm by combining very flashy palettes. This can prove fatal and may drive away visitors. Always create eye soothing color combination that gels well with your blog theme. First try them on a test blog and take feedback from some of your fellow bloggers. Once you are sure that the generated palettes will not repel the visitors, transfer the rotating ads on the main blog.

Continue Reading

0 comments - By Rajeev Edmonds - Digg This

10 Incredibly Useful Blogmaster Tools

Today in this post, Hitesh Sahni from ProChow shares some very useful tools and services for bloggers.

Already there are overwhelming number of posts and articles on tools and resources which facilitate the work of a blogger and improve the blogging efficiency. So why another post again on the same thing. The previous statement itself has the reason for it. You can browse your way into the blogosphere until you find the real gems of blogging or you can read this post.

I would have easily created a list of 50+ or 100+ tools that I use on a regular basis but that would have given no value. This is because such lists are already available in abundance. Here is a list of particular blogmaster tools which are very little known but are heavily useful. These are the tools that make you feel - "I wish I knew about it earlier enough".Enjoy.

NotePad++

Although most of the publishing platforms today offer friendly user interfaces and simple graphic layouts , but tweaking the Html or the CSS directly is the only way to have complete control over the look of your blog. Notepad++ is as simple as the traditional Notepad, but it comes packed with many useful features, including syntax and html tags highlighting, auto-completion, drag 'n' drop, macros.

Browser Shots

When you load your blog on a different browser, other than the one which you used to design your blog, it is probable that some unpleasant surprises will appear. Browsershots takes screenshots of your site in different browsers and report them back to you. All you need to do is to type the URL of your site, select the browsers you want to test and wait some minutes to see the screenshots. The service includes all the versions of IE, Firefox, Safari and Opera and you can even select different screen resolutions.

ServerMojo

Server monitoring is an essential tool for any blogmaster. Its a simple fact that when your server is down you lose money! Servermojo is a free monitoring service that can check your blog every 15 minutes to ensure it's up and running. It will monitor your servers web, ping, dns, mysql and more. The system will send you free notifications by Email any time your server is not responding.

Copyscape

Blog content plagiarism is widespread these days. This tool makes it easy to find copies of your content on the Web. Simply type in the address of your web page, and copyscape does the rest. Copyscape finds sites that have copied your content without permission, as well as those that have quoted you. You can also place free copyscape banners on your website to warn potential plagiarists against stealing your content.

Google Trends

One of the key ways to get more exposure is to write about whats hot and whats popular. You can view the latest Google search trends with this tool. It is very useful for getting a sense of what the most popular keywords searches currently are, so you can possibly utilize them for your next blog post.

Big Boards

A very simple yet effective way to promote your blog is through the use of online forums. Big-Boards.com is an excellent resource to find large forums related to topic of your blog. Most of the boards allow the user to create a signature, make sure you use it to place a link to your blog with a small description of what users will find there.Now you are set, just engage in the discussions and contribute with useful information, so that people will want to check out your signature link.

Meta Tag Analyzer

The title tag might be the most important factor on the header of a site, but all the other meta tags (description, keywords and author) should also be considered. Meta Tag Analyzer is a very helpful tool for understanding your meta tags. All you need to do is to type the address of your site and it will report the status of the page, the number of keywords, the relevancy of the title, the quality of the tags and much more.

FileZilla

Whether you have a blog or a normal website one of the most important applications that you will use is the FTP. The File Transfer Protocol is the most efficient way to get pictures or files to and from the server that is hosting your site. This open source FTP client is fast and reliable and it also has all the advanced features that you will probably ever need.

Ecto

I'm a big user of this tool. It is blogging tool that allows you to post offline. It also has a nifty two click 'blog this' function that lets you highlight text in an article that you want to quote. With just one key stroke you can import the highlighted text, article title and a link to the article into your blog tool from your browser to be posted with just another click. Using ecto you can speed up your posting to over 50 posts per day.

Fireshot

I know that you are already using some firefox addon to take website screenshots. But this is an addon with a difference. Unlike other extensions, this plugin provides a set of editing and annotation tools, which let users quickly modify web captures and insert text annotations and graphical annotations. It's possible to choose whether you want to capture entire web page or take screenshot of only visible part of the web page.

So that's it. There may be probably more tools. But they demand one's own discretion about whether they can be called as little known and heavily useful. Feel free to suggest your favorite tools.

Continue Reading

2 comments - By Rajeev Edmonds - Digg This

Best of 2008 on MintBlogger

Here are the best posts published on MintBlogger in 2008.

Blogging Basics

1. How To Get Instant Traffic For Your Blog
2. Blog Traffic Analysis Demystified: Part - 3 (Advanced Segmentation)
3. The Art of Guest Blogging: How To Do It Correctly
4. How To Choose a Profitable Blog Niche

Social Media Marketing

1. 8 Ways To Promote Your Blog On Facebook
2. 220+ Best Social Media Resources
3. 7 Must Read Tips To Create Digg-Friendly Content
4. MicroBlogging: Twhirl Guide For Beginners - Part 1
5. Blog Marketing And YouTube: An Introduction


A very happy and prosperous new year wishes for all the readers.

Continue Reading

0 comments - By Rajeev Edmonds - Digg This

Using Forums: A Comprehensive Guide To Forum Etiquettes

One of the better ways to get more exposure and to bring more traffic to blogs is participating in discussion forums. If you are active in several discussions forums of related niche, more people in the community know you and you also get the chance to prove your authority in your niche.

Choosing the best discussion forums is not hard at all. You can use various search engines to find out the most popular forums related to your blog's niche. If your list becomes long, reduce it further by selecting only those with high traffic and large active community. Remember, participating in forums eats up time, so choose wisely and register in select forums (at most 4-5).

Registering & Building User Profile

Choosing A Good User Name

While registering for an account, a good user name (id) is very essential. Sometimes, newbies don't pay attention to this and register with cryptic names, for example., try678. If your blog has a brandable name or if you are using a short tagline you can use that as your user name. Your own name is also an excellent choice, provided somebody else has not grabbed it before. In either case, your user name must clearly co-relate with you and your blog.

Signature File

Every forum may have different policy for signatures used by forum members. Some allow creating signature right from the beginning, while others enable this feature after you have reached certain number of posts. Whatever is the policy; never flood your signature section with loads of links. I would suggest you to leave a single link initially, and later on you can add more as your contribution grows.

Avatar

Avatars have the power to create your brand. Give first preference to your own thumbnail image while uploading your avatar. In case, you decide not to use your own picture, make sure you do not choose NSFW avatar, unless you are registering for a forum serving explicit content. An excellent strategy to be known by your avatar is to use a common graphic for all forums, social media sites, and blog comments.

Starting Out

Reading Forum Policy and Guidelines

It is always advisable to devote some time and carefully read the rules and regulations of the forum. This will prevent any unintentional breach of T&C, that may result in banning of your account.

Introducing Yourself

Almost every forum has an 'Introduce Yourself' or similar kind of thread, where new users are expected to introduce themselves to the community. This is an excellent opportunity for you to grab immediate attention of the community by posting an appealing introduction spiced up with humor. Social media experts use this technique very effectively to get instant popularity within any online social community. While introducing yourself, provide your name, your location, what you do (provide relevant links) and for what you have joined this forum. The last part that I have mentioned is very important. Expand this last part and see the difference.

Identify Key Players

Every discussion forum has some very popular members including administrators, moderators and some highly active members with excellent posting record. Traverse the forum and make a list of these members. The whole purpose of this exercise is to get familiar with all major players so that you can build strong relationships with them, which will help you in making your profile more strong in the community. The stronger your presence, higher the attention you will get.

Identify Popular Threads

Browse all sub-forums to filter out most popular threads and start by contributing to these threads. Religiously follow-up discussions in these threads to get the maximum attention of the community. Once you get settled you can start your own threads.

Contribute Regularly

In your busy blogging schedule, take out some time and visit your forums at least once every 2-3 days. If you can make it everyday nothing can be better than that. Users who provide prompt and easy solutions are very popular in the forums. Whatever your strengths are, use them to the maximum and help the community with open heart. There is nothing wrong in providing a link to a particular post on your blog while posting a solution to the problem, provided you do not do it unnecessarily or in every other post.

Leveraging Network Connections

Once you are well established in these discussion forums, you are bound to get strong connections with countless peers in similar niche. Here comes the real part of milking these connections to help grow your profile. But remember, it's a give and take deal and you should always be ready to reciprocate as per your capacity. You can appear as a guest blogger and can invite guest posts in return. Forum members often form a social media voting group that helps immensely in promoting each other's content. These network connections also act as a referrer of your services and expertise through word of mouth.

Do's And Dont's

Image Credit: Zahra

Here are some common Do's and Dont's for discussion forum users.

Do's

1. Thou shalt abide by forum rules and regulations.
2. Thou shalt help the needy ones in the community.
3. Thou shalt try to regularly contribute to the forum.
4. Thou shalt help moderators in every possible way.

Dont's

1. Thou shalt not post obnoxious comments.
2. Thou shalt not spam.
3. Thou shalt not upload malware or malicious scripts.
4. Thou shalt not initiate irrelevant and off-topic threads.
5. Thou shalt not embed affiliate links in posts.
6. Thou shalt not create duplicate threads in different sub-forums.
7. Thou shalt not impersonate other visitors.
8. Thou shalt not post any pornographic or NSFW content.
9. Thou shalt not upload NSFW avatars.

Over To You

Do you regularly take part in discussion forums? If yes, what other techniques you use to get the maximum from these excellent sources.

Continue Reading

0 comments - By Rajeev Edmonds - Digg This

5 Best SEO Tips For Bloggers

Web content creation and search engine optimization go hand in hand. You have great writing skills, but still wondering why your content is not getting higher ranks in SERP's? Maybe you are not paying attention to some basic SEO techniques that can help your blog posts achieve good ranks in relevant search results. Let's see some basic SEO tweaks, that are easy to implement and can do wonders in optimizing your blog's content for search engines.

Use Dashes Instead Of Underscores

If is often debated whether we should use dashes or underscores in the url. Everyone has it's own opinion and generally people end the debate by saying "It's a matter of personal preference, both do well". Well, here's what Matt Cutts has to say about it...

So if you have a url like word1_word2, Google will only return that page if the user searches for word1_word2 (which almost never happens). If you have a url like word1-word2, that page can be returned for the searches word1, word2, and even “word1 word2″. That’s why I would always choose dashes instead of underscores. To answer a common question, Google doesn’t algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url. Of course I can only speak for Google, not other search engines.

We can see, he clearly states the advantage of using dashes over underscores. This fact is further supported by the default url structure in Wordpress, Blogger and all other major blogging platforms. All of them automatically use dashes instead of underscores.

Optimizing Pics (SEO Friendly Images)

Use of illustrations in blog posts is quite common, and almost all of us use them every now and then to make the posts more sticky and readable. If we are using images in our posts, we must also know how to make them SEO friendly to get extra traffic from search engines. If optimized correctly, we can get very good traffic through 'Google Image Search'. To clearly understand this optimization process, lets take the example of an image shown below.

Image Credit: majortk

1. Naming Files Correctly

Choosing a file name that correctly describes the context of the image makes it easy for the indexing bots to categorize it in a better way. Wrong way to name the above image is IMG02056.jpg.

How about ball.jpg?
Hey, that's obvious buddy.

What if we name it blue-ball?
That's better.

And how about plastic-blue-ball?
Hah, that's excellent...

2. Descriptive <alt> Tag

Let's take a look at the HTML code, that we use in embedding the images in blog posts.

i) Bad Approach

<img src=/images/IMAGE02056.jpg"/>

ii) Better Way

<img src=/images/blue-ball.jpg" alt="Blue ball"/>

iii) Best Way

<img src=/images/plastic-blue-ball.jpg" alt="An air filled plastic blue ball"/>

Note the descriptive alt tag, that will help in better categorization of the image while indexing will be done by various search engine bots. This will increase the chances of this image being shown in relevant image search.

Wrapping Contextual Text Around The Image

Make sure you embed the image right in the middle of the related content, with relevant titles and descriptive text. This will further help the bots to better categorize and index the image.

Smart Anchor Text

Linking out to resources and information is an essential ingredient of any blog post. Whether we are linking to any external blog/website or doing cross-linking (internal linking) of posts, choosing a proper anchor text increases the relevance of the content to which it is referring. Proper anchor text helps in achieving better ranking in SERP's and is one of the most important part of on-page optimization process. Here is an example that shows proper implementation of anchor texts.

First take a look at this example with poor anchor text as well as redundant text.

Blogger has introduced a blog exporting feature to easily export a blogger blog with minimum efforts. To know more about it click here.

Now the same paragraph revised with optimized anchor text and stripped redundant text.

Blogger has introduced a new blog exporting feature to easily export a blog with minimum efforts.

In the first example, not only text is redundant, but the phrase that we have selected for the anchor text has no relevance to the post to which it is referring. On the other hand, in the second example we have stripped off the redundant text and have chosen a relevant phrase that accurately define the content of the page to which it is going to refer.

Optimized Permalink Structure

An optimized permalink format helps in boosting the rank of your posts in search results. Blogger does not allow manual modification of permalink structure, but it has fairly good automated permalink generation system.

On the other hand, Wordpress allows you to modify the permalink structure as per your needs. Not only we can create a global permalink structure, but can also edit the permalink at the post level. By default, Wordpress has a cryptic permalink structure such as http://www.yourblog.com/?p=123. Here post id is included in the URL, giving no indication about the content of the post.

The permalink structure should be such that robots can easily identify the content through it. To change your Wordpress blog permalink structure go to 'Settings -> Permalinks' and click the 'Custom Structure' option.

Fill the following structure tag in the text box to create most search engine friendly URL:

/%postname%/

After completing this setting, the permalink structure will be something like http://www.yourblog.com/seo-tips-for-bloggers, which clearly tells the robots about the content that is associated with this URL.

Create XML Sitemap and robots.txt

Create a robot.txt file to prevent robots crawling useless or duplicate content. You can create this file in a simple text editor and saving it as robots.txt.

Here is a typical robots.txt file with some common entries that indicate those paths that should not be crawled by bots.

User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /rss/
Disallow: /comments/feed/
Disallow: /page/
Disallow: /date/
Disallow: /comments/

After creating this file, upload it at the root of your blog's domain.

Creating a sitemap ensures that robots can easily understand the structure of your blog and can easily crawl the content. There are many online sitemap generation services that can be used to generate the map. Wordpress bloggers can use the Google sitemap generator plugin to automate the sitemap creation process. After this plugin is installed, every time you will edit or post on your blog, this plugin will automatically update the sitemap.

Over To You

What other SEO tweaks you do on your blog? Does it include optimized meta tags, inter-linking of posts and keyword stuffing?

Continue Reading

10 comments - By Rajeev Edmonds - Digg This

How To Update And Improve Old Content On Your Blog

As your blog's archive grows in size, so does the need to update, improve and optimize old entries. If you develop the habit of identifying dead content on your blog and keep reviving it frequently, you can pull back all the traffic that you were losing prior to optimizing your old content. If your blog's archive is huge, reviving exercise can prove to be a very cumbersome process. Let's see how to get this done effectively with minimum efforts.

It is very essential to first divide your archive in two broad categories.

1. Best content getting highest traffic.
2. Content receiving no traffic or with very high bounce rate.

Identifying Top Content

You may ask, "What is the need to waste time with content already getting high traffic?". Well, by researching and observing common traits of the most successful content on your blog, you will get an important database of valuable information that will help in rejuvenating and optimizing the non-performing content.

Use Google Analytics to see the best performing content on your blog. To get that, go to your blog's GA dashboard, and then go to 'Content -> Top Content'.

This report gives you the list of posts arranged in ascending order based on the number of pageviews in a given period of time. Examine top 10-30 posts and try to figure out the following information.

1. Avg. post length
2. Use of images
3. Topics
4. Keyword density
5. Avg. outbound links

By investing some time in this exercise and by gathering this vital data, you can better assess and rectify the mistakes done in non-performing entries, and can correct them in a more effective manner.

Identifying Non-performing Content

To identify dead content, simply generate the same 'Top Content' report and look from bottom to top.

Important: While viewing this report from bottom to up you will find many entries of top performing posts, which can confuse you. If you will hover your mouse on that entry you will see the url containing additional parameters as shown below.

/2008/11/100-excellent-blogger-templates.htm?s=green+flower&x=0&y=0

Simply skip these entries and keep moving upwards and pick those entries with no additional parameters at end as shown below.

/2008/05/useful-webtools-resources-for-blogger.html

These entries with no additional parameters in url are non-performing entries while moving from bottom to top. Make a list of these posts and divide them into equal parts. Every month end, take one part and work on it.

Optimizing and Rejuvenating Non-performing Content

At this point, we have our list ready in our hands and we can start updating these old non-performing posts.

Adding Images To The Post (Making Posts More Sticky)

Adding illustrations in posts make them more readable and sticky. Identify posts with no images and add relevant images to these posts. Make sure you do not overdo it.

Identifying and Removing Dead Links (Addressing Visitor's Annoyance)

This is one of the most important tasks to do while modifying and improving old posts. Dead links can hurt your hard earned reputation and you can loose countless potential subscribers.

The simplest way to find the dead links is to use 'Google Webmaster Tools'. Once you have identified these links, there can be two possibilities while handling them. Either to remove them completely or provide a new alternate link. Depending on the situation and the availability of alternate link, you can modify or remove these dead links from your post.

Updating Old Paras (Change of Opinion)

With passage of time, your opinion may change on any subject. Updating old paragraphs voicing your changed opinion can spark a life in your old post.

Adding New Paras (New Developments)

In several posts, you may want to add some new content supplementing the new developments that have taken place since that post was published. When adding some extra content, you can mention 'Update' in bold letters, but it entirely depends on your choice. I prefer to inform my readers that I am adding an update to the post. This makes them aware of new content and also gives them the feeling of getting fresh updated content from my blog.

Over To You

Do you update old non-performing content on your blog? If yes, what other methods you use to update them?

Continue Reading

4 comments - By Rajeev Edmonds - Digg This

Blog Traffic Analysis Demystified: Part - 4 (Link Tracking)

So far in this series we have learned about some basic metrics to better understand the information provided by our web analytics programs. How about tracking individual links and tracking downloads? Let's dig in deep and try to understand how to use Google Analytics to better understand the visitors behavior on our blog by tracking links.

Tracking Outbound/Internal Links And Downloads

If our blog's bounce rate is high, we may be interested in identifying 'Exit Pages' that are getting maximum bounces. Just by viewing the 'Exit Pages' report, we cannot correctly determine those outbound links through which we are losing our traffic. For that, we can add some analytics code to those outbound links that we want to track. Suppose, we want to track an outbound link 'http://www.externalsite dot com/'. For that, we have to add one more attribute to the link code as shown below.

<a href="http://www.externalsite.com" onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/externalsite.com');">

The directory structure we have used is a logical one and we can use any name for it. For example, you can name it as '/outlinks/3rdlinkonXpage'. But to keep it simple and easy to understand we can create a logical directory 'outbound' to track all outbound links on our blog. Similarly if we are tracking internal links, we can use the directory structure as '/inbound/somelinktopost....'.

Note: To make it work correctly, your analytics code must be placed before _trackPageview calls. The ideal place is just after <body> tag as shown below.

------
------
<body>
/* Analytcis Code that you normally place just before </body> tag at bottom */
-----
-----
.trackPageview() call
----
----
.trackPageview() call

Fine Tuning Tracking

Now let's go one step further and take some a bit complex case. It can be possible that a same external link is present in several blog posts and you want to track each one of them. In this case, the best way to track identical outbound links is to add an extra attribute to the logical directory structure to make it more understandable while viewing the reports.

You can add post ID to the directory structure to identify a common external link that is present in multiple posts. Here is an example.

/outbound/234/commonexternallink...
/outbound/12/commonexternallink...

In this example, same link in present in two posts having post ID's 234 and 12. After applying the modified directory structure as shown above, you can easily identify which post's link was clicked. A more friendly directory structure can be made by picking the first 20-30 characters of post title and using it in place of post IDs.

Similarly, we can also track downloads that we may offer on our blog. For example, suppose you are offering Blogging.pdf and seo-secrets.mp3 (2 downloads) free to your subscribers. To track these downloads, add the .trackPageview() call to the download links with a proper directory structure.

<a href="http://www.yourblog.com/Blogging.pdf" onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/downloads/PDF/Blogging.pdf');">


<a href="http://www.yourblog.com/seo-secrets.mp3" onClick="javascript: pageTracker._trackPageview('/downloads/audio/seo-secrets.mp3');">

Note the directory structure used for tracking the links. In the above example, all downloads will be tracked through a logical directory downloads. We can further divide the downloads according to the file type by giving additional sub-directory for each file type.

Important: To view all the reports related to link tracking, go to 'Content -> Top Content' in your GA dashboard.

Series Posts

1 . Blog Traffic Analysis Demystified: Part - 1 (Hit Rate)
2 . Blog Traffic Analysis Demystified: Part - 2 (Sessions)
3 . Blog Traffic Analysis Demystified: Part - 3 (Advanced Segmentation)

Continue Reading

0 comments - By Rajeev Edmonds - Digg This