Young bloggers and online tuition

There are young bloggers who are still in schools and colleges. Now blogging and the Internet can be a very addictive activity which can steal much of their productive time and I sure hope none of them will go down the route I went when neglected exercise and my health when I became a blogging and Internet addict.

Young bloggers need to pay attention to their school and college work and some may want to consider further getting some form of homework help. The current generation are much more fortunate than us who have gone through that phase very much earlier when the Internet nor the computer haven't even been invented yet. Now with the ubiquitous Internet, tuition online is at the tip of their fingers which they can get without getting out from their home.

I believe that I probably wouldn't be too off the mark if I guess that the areas that most students need help with is probably math and algebra as these can involve very abstract ideas which takes time to absorb and comprehend.

Blogging, exercise and healthy hobby

It has been a good 5 years since I started blogging and I must say blogging and the Internet has brought me tremendous benefits and much joy to the extend that I had neglected the need to exercise and my health. That is, until I got a scare. The doctor said my blood pressure was 150/90 and wanted to put me on medicine. I told the doctor, if I start those hypertension medicine, I will have to take them for life. I wanted to try exercise and diet. I am pleased to report that at my last visit to that doctor, he told me I am not only OK but he would not even consider my case as pre-hypertension.

Well folks, do take note, do take care of your health, and do exercise and not be extreme and blog till ill health visiy you. You should read about my "conversation" with grandson regarding exercise and a wise commentator said, "Go buy the Shorts grand dad."

Well, I not only bought plenty of shorts, I also bought sport shoes and wondering if I should consider trial running shoes. I have also started exercising with exercise machines at the gym.

However, to be really healthy physically and mentally, one should also consider having more hobbies such as hiking, camping, etc. I have a couple of sleeping bags and used to have a tent for camping and enjoy the outdoor fun

Desktop, laptop tablet computer for blogging

A computer with access to the Internet is a minimum requirement for blogging unless you are moblogging (blogging using mobile phone). Undecided about whether to get a desktop computer or a laptop computer? Here is a Laptop versus Desktop computer comparison.

While reading this article Laptop Computer Buying Guide, I learned about tablet computers just like the one in the photo below:

Photo of tablet computer is property of Keian K

.

Here is another photo of a hybrid tablet computer which has the screen connected to the rest of the laptop by a pivot. You can swing the screen around, close the lid with the screen pointing outward and you have changed the laptop to a tablet computer:



Now if your blogging involves a lot of graphics, getting a tablet computer (a laptop or slate-shaped mobile computer, equipped with a touchscreen or graphics tablet/screen hybrid to operate the computer with a stylus or digital pen, or a fingertip, instead of a keyboard or mouse} is a very good idea.

Google Analytics user interface - video tutorial

Google Analytics is a visitor counter which gives you a huge amount of statistics and it may be a good idea to start using Google Analytics in addition to Statcounter.

To derive maximum benefits from Google Analytics, you should first familiarize yourself with its user interface, and you can easily do that by watching this video tutorial:



Transcript: This video provides a brief overview of how to use the Google Analytics interface. If you are new to Google Analytics, or you like to pick up a few tips on how to use some of the different features, this video is a good place to start.

When you first sign into your Google Analytics account, you'll see this screen which shows a list of your profiles. If you just started to use Google Analytics, you probably have just one profile. Click VIEW REPORTS to get started.

Let's look at the Dashboard, which is the first report you'll see. The Dashboard is where you put all the summary information about your site that you want to see at a glance. To add a report to the Dashboard, just go to the report that you want to add, and then click Add to Dashboard. And here, going back to the Dashboard, if I scroll to the bottom, is the traffic sources overview that I just added.

On the Dashboard itself, you can position the report summaries however you like, and delete the ones you don't need. One nice feature about the Dashboard is that it lets you jump directly to the specific report you've saved. So here, I jump directly from my Dashboard to a full report on California.

So now it may be a good time to your most important reports and put them on your Dashboard.

Finding Reports

In the left hand navigation, you will see each of the reports are organized into groups. Anything about visitors, whether they are located geographically, what their language preferences are, how frequently they come to your site, and which kind of computers and browsers they used, is found in the visitors section.

The traffic sources section show how people got to your site. This is where to look if you want to see which keywords people used, which ad they clicked on.

Content is all about the pages in your site. Which ones were the most popular, which ones served as entry pages to your site, and which ones were the pages from which people exited from your site.

If you have defined your conversion goals, the goals reports shows your conversions and conversion rates. The goals are website pages which visitors reach once they have made a purchase or completed another desired action such as a registration, or a download.

Defining goals and monitoring conversions is an important way to measure how well the site contributes to you business objectives.

The eCommerce section contains your merchandising, transaction and revenue activity reports.

You don't have to use the left navigations to get to your reports. The reports themselves contain links and suggestions to help you discover new information.

Setting the Date Range

The active date range is alway displayed on the upper right of your report. Click the your own date range and then type in your dates, or use the calendar or the timeline to select the date range. Click APPLY.

You can compare 2 date ranges against each other. Under comparison, select DATE RANGE. And here is a tip. Instead of for example just September and August, I am going to line up the dates so that I can compare weekdays with weekdays, and weekends with weekends. Since the first of September is a Friday, I am going to shift my 30-day comparison period, so that it start on Friday July 28^th instead of August 1^st. Next, I am going to active the COMPARE DATES option here.

Now when I look at the graph, I can make meaningful day-by-day comparisons, comparing Fridays to Fridays, Saturdays to Saturdays, and so forth.

Over-time Comparisons

On reports that contain graphs, you can select the matrix that you want to graph over time. In this report, we are graphing visits. So let's change it to AVERAGE PAGES PER VISIT. Or you can compare two matrix against each other. For example, here we are comparing average pages per visit versus the goal one conversion rate. There is the average visits in blue and the goal one conversionn rate in yellow.

Unless you are comparing 2 day ranges, you have the option of comparing matrix against the site average. Here we are looking at the average pages per visit for AdWord visitors, that is the blue line, versus the average pages per visit for the average visitor, that's the thin gray line.

Scorecards and Tables

Most reports have a score card, and then a table below the score card. The score card summarizes all the data that's included in the table. So here, for example, we are looking at the average traffic from 3 keywords. There were 57 visits from people who came in on these keywords, and on the average, each visitors are 18 pages and spend about a minute and a half on the site. Most of these visits were from new visitors, people who never been to the site before, and over 19% of them left after seeing only one page.

Looking down the table, you can see the same data broken down into each keyword. To look at your conversion and conversion rates, you click the goal conversion tab. To look at your eCommerce activities, you click the eCommerce tab.

The clicks tab is unique to the average report, and it shows you Adword specific matrix that we will look at in details in another video. You can always get an explanation for any one of these matrixs on the scorecard by clicking the question mark bubble.

You can segment the table in different ways using the segment pulldown. So if you want to see this average traffic broken by city, you just select CITY from the pull-down.

You can use the buttons at the upper right of the score cards to visualize your data as a pie chart, a bar graph, a comparison to the site matrixs. Or as an aggregate summary.

Emailing and exporting existing reports

Finally, you can facilitate information sharing and collaborative decision making by emailing the reports.

To email a report, click the email button that appears at the top of every report. You can send the report immediately, or set up a regularly scheduled email. Or you can add the report to an email that you already scheduled.

So now it might be a good time to try creating a few scheduled from your of your most important reports.

Exporting data in other formats is another tool in sharing and collaborating. To export a report, you just click the EXPORT BUTTON at the top of the report and select the format you want.

And here is a tip. If you want to create a high resolution print-ready presentation, export your report to PDF. The PDF reports are vector based, so they scale to large size and still looks great.

Copyright free content for blogs

Free articles for your blog

A few days ago I received an email alerting me of the existence of Article Alley which provides, while not exactly copyright free articles, free articles that you can republish in your blog. This was exactly what I want as I need a demo blog for a multi-columns template, namely Good Computer Software.

Although Article Alley did not specifically stated the conditions under which their articles can be republished, generally such content provider do require active links to their website as well as to the author.

Now Article Alley has conveniently provided a republish button which when clicked upon lead to a page where you can copy-paste the article as HTML or plain TEXT. Now assuming that Article Alley do require clickable links, if you use their plain text, you will probably have to type in the relevant HTML to make those required links active.

If you chose to use the HTML version, here are a few points you should take careful note of. Their HTML was created for normal websites and thus will contain codes that are not necessary for blogs. Let me elaborate. The HTML version for <
begins with

<html>
<head>
<title>Search Engine Optimization - The Key To Achieve Online Success</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Search Engine Optimization - The Key To Achieve Online Success</h1>
<div class="info">.......

Those first few lines in green are superfluous and should be left out. Start copy-paste from the line
<h1>.....

The ending lines of the codes for republishing are:

<div class="source">Article Source: <a href="http://www.articlealley.com/article_964906_81.html">http://www.articlealley.com/article_964906_81.html</a></div>
<div class="author">
<div class="authorBio"></div>
</author>
</body>
</html>

The last 2 lines in blue are also superfluous and should be left out.

Now there is one glaring mistake. The closing tag (in red) </author> is a mistake and should be replaced with </div>

I have republished from Article Alley: How to control cookies in Internet Explorer 6 at a demostration blog Good Computer Software: How to control cookies in Internet Explorer 6. Note the huge blank space between paragraphs. This is because Article Alley have included line break tags <br /> which caused the large blank spaces. What I did was to delete the line break tags and separated the paragraphs by clicking the return key to create a single line break.

To demonstrate, I have republished another article from Article Alley: Why is keeping the computer's registry clean is so important at Good Computer Software: Why is keeping the computer's registry clean is so important. Note that there are no large breaks between paragraphs. The paragraphs are all separated by a single line break.

Search Engine Optimization, PageRank and backlinks

If you value traffic to your blog, you would pay attention to getting backlinks (inbound links) from other blogs or websites to your blog for SEO (search engine optimization) and Google PageRank. One of the ways to get many backlinks is to submit articles to article directories like Article Alley.

Create or edit Blogger Profile

One of the feature of a blog is the blogger profile which is usually displayed in the sidebar if you choose to display the profile. When you first created your Blogger account, you would have chosen a display name and this will be reflected in the profile which will have minimal information.

If you want to edit your profile, first sign into your Blogger account to get to the Dashboard. At the top left, you will see a link EDIT PROFILE (see screen shot below):



Click on EDIT PROFILE and you will be taken to the profile editor where you can edit whatever you want to be displayed in your profile.

If you want your profile to be displayed in any blog, click on the LAYOUT tab and select the PROFILE gadget.

Video tutorial: Creating a Blog List with Blogger

Transcript of Video Tutorial: Creating a Blog List with Blogger

Creating a blog list with Blogger. You might be asking yourself, what is a blog list? At its most basic, a blog list, also known as a blog roll, is a list of links to your favorite blogs in your sidebar. In addition, a blog list can also show you the date of each blog last update, or even the title and snippets of its most recent post.

It's really easy to add a blog list. First, log into your Blogger account and click the LAYOUT link. If you don't see a LAYOUT, you probably is using a old Blogger classic template, in which case you will see a TEMPLATE link. If this is the case, you'll have to upgrade to LAYOUT in order to use the blog list feature. You can do so by clicking CUSTOMIZE DESIGN from within your TEMPLATE tab. You will then be prompted to upgrade your template.

From your DASHBOARD, click the LAYOUT link. Then click ADD A PAGE ELEMENT (now called ADD A GADGET). Next, select BLOG LIST. You can then name your blog list and decide how you would like to sort and whether or not you would like a snippet of each blog lastest post to appear. You can always come back to change your settings later. Finally, click ADD A BLOG TO YOUR LIST to begin building your blog list. If you use Google Reader, an option will appear to import your subscription to your blog directly. Otherwise, enter the URL of the blog you like to link to. Keep in mind that you aren't limited to just blogs. You can add a link to any webpage to your blog list. However, please note that snippets will only appear for webpages with a valid RSS feed. If snippets aren't appearing, try adding the URL of the RSS feed directly. That's it, enjoy your blog list.