Sounds like about as much fun as pulling teeth, huh? Actually, it can be quite fun and interesting – not to mention, a necessity if you want to grow your blog’s traffic.
I was browsing some blogs I frequent and I came across a poll on the best blog analytics software over at TopRankBlog.com. I took part in the poll and wasn’t a bit surprised about the results that the analytics tool most overwhelmingly voted for was Google Analytics – 68% of the 188 votes (at time of this post). Google recently integrated their analytics with AdWords making a nice one-stop-stat-checking-shop (yes, I am a poet in my spare time), and it is an extremely robust analytics tool. So is it my favorite tool? No.
You see I use Google Analytics, and it is good for a quick snapshot (even though the feature set is actually huge), but I find that it is inaccurate when compared against the other tools I have tested – so I supplement it with a tool called Stat Counter. I am not going to do an in-depth review as I already did a Stat Counter review over at worldomarketing.com. I just find it a much more quicker to use tool than Google Analytics, and it is free for a log size up to 500 entries. I know, not much if you have a lot of traffic, but if you are just starting out, it is really a great way to measure efforts. By the way, you can pay to increase the size of your log (I think there is a joke in there somewhere).
So what do I mean by measuring efforts? If you are new to online marketing, you may be under the illusion that all you have to do is put up a blog or website and the traffic will roll in. Not so unless you hit the Internet lottery (don’t know what that is, but you must of hit it if you get traffic for no effort).
Anyway, you will be undergoing different tactics to get traffic to your site. Will they all work? Probably not, but you can be assured that of those that do work, some will work better than others. How can you tell?
Having an analytic tool like Stat Counter will help you to target your efforts on traffic gaining tactics that do work and not wasting time on those that don’t.
You want an example don’t you? Okay, here is one:
You finally sign up for a Twitter account (an follow me of course), and start tweeting (your little 140 character max posts on Twitter). After following proper Twitter etiquette of not having every tweet a blatant attempt to sell your product (trust me, don’t do this), and having a fair number of “contributing” tweets, you decide to write a tweet about your latest blog post. You can then track and see if there is a change in your baseline (average number of daily visitors). Hopefully there is. But how do you know they are due to Twitter? Well, the tools in Stat Counter tell you where your visitors come from – pretty cool, huh? But that is just basic.
Trust me, sign up for your free account and try it out. I know you are thinking that I am just trying to get some affiliate money off of you by pushing this service – WRONG! As far as I know, they don’t have an affiliate program. I am pushing this product because I like it, and it is useful.
For more useful information about analytics, go check out the post on best blog analytics software that inspired me to write this entry.
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Thanks for your post, I found it very interesting. I pretty new to network marketing, all the new terminology shooting around, attratction marketing, LOA, branding, direct, network, multi. Trying to wrap my head around it is mind boggling.