5) Analytics

Use Google analytics to track your visitors and monitor their behaviour when they arrive.  Google Analytics is an extremely powerful resource and it’s free to anyone who has a Google account.  By pasting a tracking code into your html or php you will very quickly see the entry points and exit points and everything in between.

The power of tracking is always completley under estimated and under used, possibly one of the most powerful elements of Google Analytics is the facility to discover which keywords your visitors are typing into which search engine in order to find your site.  Once they are there you can see how long they stay and this is a representation they have tagged as Bounce Rate.  The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors that enter your site and for whatever reason they leave almost immediatley, the bounce is a metric that is important in Google determining if your pages are relevant to the search terms and keywords used to enter your site.

Geographical information is also available through Google Analytics so to recap the value in tracking is knowing who is coming to your website, from where they came using which search engine, via which keyword, which page did they land on, how long dod they stay and which page did they exit from!  Powerful stuff eh!  This allows us to change the direction of our writing to better suit the metrics of our visitors.

4) Generate Traffic

In order to make money from your blog you will need visitors to pass by every once in a while and then yhese may buy from you once in a while!  There are many strategies to driving traffic to your blog and it is a combination of the total that will provide the very best results for increasing visitors.

Social Bookmarking is a popular ‘promotional’ method used by almsot every professional blogger, this process allows you to get the word out about yours and other peoples articles and points of interest.  The facility to bookmark on a central service as opposed to on your pc offers a pathway for people to follow links of interest and occasionally allows some Page Rank to pass over to your page.

Article Marketing is another popular form of driving traffic to your posts,  By writing (not copying) articles that are compelling and offer ‘slipperiness’ to your subject, you can seduce your prospects to click on your article links and visit your blog.  Very few (if any) article directories offer any Page Rank opportunities.  The most popular article drievtory by far is Ezine Articles, I refer to these sites as content clusters and the sheer volume of unique content and semantically structured writing makes the site extremely Google friendly, so your article sits within an authority framework with high PR.

Link Building is another form of traffic funnelling and in the process gaining a certain amount of PR on occassion.  Submitting your site to Directories results in one way links to your domain which offers more opportunities for being discovered for search terms and phrases.

There are many many different ways to generate traffic to your blogs, there are also many methods that have been in favour and have subsequently fallen out of favour!  Just write about your niche and then see what happens with a little social bookmarking.

RSS (really simple syndication) is a facility whereby each post that you write is pinged (like a digital transmitter speaking to digital receivers) to all of the Search Engines and RSS directories, resulting in frsh indexing from GoogleBot and the other lesser known and cared about SE Spiders.