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.
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.
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 28th instead of August 1st. 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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
Transcript of Video Tutorial: Adjusting your Blogger privacy settings
Hi, my name is Eric Case, and I am Blogger Product Manager. Blogger.com is a service that let people share articles, photos, videos, journal entries with each other on the web. And so we have a couple of settings that we are going to show you will let ..... that you can see what you are writing about. To adjust the privacy settings for your blog, click the SETTINGS tab in Blogger. You will be taken to the first tab that is called BASIC. If you add your blog to our listing and set to YES, it may be linked from blogger.com when you update it, which can send visitors to your blog. If this is set to NO, it wouldn't be linked from Blogger, but it will still be viewable on the public web. If you don't want certain blogs in your Profile to be viewable from Blogger, click EDIT DISPLAYED BLOGS and uncheck the boxes next to the blogs you don't want others to see.
Now we have another settings that let you control how search engines like Google interact with your blog. The default settings for letting search engines crawl and index your blog is YES, but if you select NO, then automatically search engines should respect that preference, and your blog shouldn't appear in any search results.
Now even if you select your SETTINGS to not let your blog be linked from blogger.com or let search engines crawl it, people can still visit your blog by going to your blog URL. To control access to your blog URL, go to SETTINGS, then click the PERMISSIONS tab. Once you're there, you can choose whether ANYBODY, or ONLY PEOPLE I CHOOSE or ONLY BLOG AUTHORS can view your blog via its blog URL.
If you want to let your friends post to your blog as well as it, click ADD AUTHORS and add the email addresses whom you would like to rant permission to co-author your blog. Thanks for watching.
Transcript of video tutorial: Adding a Google Gadget to your blog
Do you know that there are tens of thousands of cool applications, tools and games you can add to your blog? They are called gadgets, and you can add them directly to your blog by browsing the gadget directory. To add a gadget, click the LAYOUT link from your Dashboard.
If you don't see a LAYOUT link, you are probably still using the old Blogger classic template in which case you will see a TEMPLATE link. If this is the case, you will have to upgrade to LAYOUT in order to add Gadgets. You can do so by clicking CUSTOMIZE DESIGN from within your template tab. You will then be prompted to upgrade your template.
From your LAYOUT tab, click ADD A GADGET to view the gadget directory. You are probably already familiar with the basic gadgets you can add to your blog. You can also access thousands of third party gadgets by browsing the different categories on the left sidebar (or use the search box to search for gadget).
You can add anything from specialized local content to tools to make your blog more useful. You can even add ways to interact with your readers and games that your readers can play. Once you find a gadget you like, just click the plus sign to add to your blog. Next, decide how you would like to customize your gadget and click SAVE.
You can now click and drag your gadget to change the position on your blog. You can even add your own creation to the gadget directory. If you have already created your gadget, click ADD YOUR OWN in the left sidebar of the gadget directory. You will then be prompted to enter the URL of your gadget. If you haven't created your gadget yet, but would will like to, there is plenty of documentation and help available online at code.google.com/apis/gadgets/
I am just a simple pensioner trying to pass his time usefully and fruitfully, blogging and participating in the Google Adsense program to supplement my pension. I am an introvert who don't laugh easily, and even harder to smile for the camera. If you want to know why I am laughing, surf over to My first grandchild attend his grandfather's birthday gathering. Note: bloggers have expressed doubts about my inability to smile at the camera, so may I suggest they have a peep at my gloomy face and my secret weapon.
