Welcome to part 4 of my series “Optimize Your Blog Using Web Analytics“. Today I am going to talk about private advertising and how analytics can help you get those advertisers that you will desperately need if you hope to make any money with blogging. If you liked this post then I recommend you check out Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3.

Why Are Analytics Important For Private Advertising?

Simply put, without analytics, you have no backbone to your advertising. Oh sure, you can say that you get XXX XXX amount of visitors daily, but without proof, is anyone going to believe you? Probably not, and therefore your private advertising sales will suffer.

If you lie, then you are not only cheating others but you are also cheating yourself. You might as well accept reality and the truth. Also it might be a personal thing, for example: I’m a person that wants to achieve everything in live without too much help but only the fair way, and not lying to myself, because it could criple your blog career.

With analytics, you can have proof that your blog is growing, that you are getting more RSS subscribers, and that you will have more potential to make more money. Analytics can also do the opposite though, they can show to you that your blog is suffering and that you need to change something.

So heres a few reasons as to why analytics can help your private advertising needs:

• They provide proof to what you say about your traffic details
• They show you how you website is growing over a period of time
• They will help you sell advertising on your blog
• They will give you more opportunity to make sells
• They speak nothing but the truth, even if you cannot handle it
• They give you an idea on how much you should charge for your private sales.

So, Now That We Know Why We Use Analytics To Boost Private Sales, How Can We Put This Into Practice?

One of the biggest mistakes I see with bloggers are trying to sell advertising on their blog is that, they never encourage advertising. If your going to sell advertising on your blog, then let your potential customers know that you are for real. Don’t be afraid to let everyone know that you are putting up ads on your blog.

One of the easiest ways to do this, is to make an Advertise Page in your navigation bar somewhere. As you can see, up at the top of my website, I have a page that is completely dedicated to people who wish to purchase advertising on my blog. I’m not going to go into too much detail about an Advertise Page, because that is a post for another day.

You know what is truly great about this page? On this page, you can ignore all the laws of readability and what not. On this page, you can brag, boost, and do whatever you want, and the nice thing about it is that, no one will judge you any different. On your Advertise Page you are allowed to do this, after all, the whole purpose of the page is to get more customers to put their ad on your site, thus making you more money.

How Does This Advertise Page link Into Using Analytics?

Well, think about it. You have a page where you can brag about all of your stats and you have your analytics software that is going to give you all of your stats. See how the two go hand in hand? Without one you can’t have the other.

If you are a little confused about what you can put on your Advertise page the here is a small list of a few things:

• Alexa Rank - Show you Alexa rank to your advertisers. It may not seem important to you, but they love this kind of stuff.
• Technorati Rank - Again, advertisers love blogs that are very well known and have higher rankings then others.
• RSS Readers - Why not show off your thousands of readers that read your blog everyday? Makes sense to me =P.
• Monthly visits - How many visitors you get per month.
• Average page views - All these little stats may see unimportant, but give them all you got. The more you give the better the chance you will make a deal.

As you can see, analytics play a big role on how you sell your advertising on your blog. So many bloggers do not take the time and effort to do these tiny little things, but they truly pay off. They make you look more professional and dedicated. These are aspects that advertisers want to see. If you can show to them that you are serious, then your chances of selling a piece of your blog to them will greatly increase.

So, thats just a little bit on how you can use Analytics to sell private advertising on your blog.

If you need some ideas or examples, you can check out my Advertise page, or the countless others that are out there. Don’t be afraid to send me an E-mail or to ask questions in the comments.

I love to hear what my readers think.

Welcome to my third part in the series Optimize Your Blog Using Web Analytics. This serie is an in depth guide to using analytics to optimize you blog. If you liked this post, be sure to check out Part 1, Part 2 and Part 4 as well.

Today I am going to look at the different ways at which you can tell whether your blog is ether performing or lacking. An important thing to watch for over time is if your blog is either:

1. Growing at a steady rate
2. Going downhill over till
3. Just not growing at all

As you can probably guess, number 1 is the one that you will probably want to achieve and numbers 2, 3 you will want to ignore. However, The problem with this is that you have to look at every little bit of area that your blog can grow from, before you consider a final conclusion. What I mean is that, you can’t judge the growth of a blog just by how many RSS readers you got or how much money you are making. Those are all factors, but they are not the end all solutions.

For this post I am going to use my results that I currently have for OwnBlogger. Hopefully you can relate to them in a sense, if you are a new blogger, as my results are very early on in this blogs lifespan.

So, the first thing I am going to take a look at is the Bounce Rate. According to Google Analytics, this is what they define the bounce rate as:

The Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page. Use this metric to measure visit quality – a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. The more compelling your landing pages, the more visitors will stay on your site and convert.

Now that we know what the bounce rate really is, how do we know if we have a good rate or not? This is what I think are good bounce rates and which are not.

• 0-30% – Your doing good and may need to do some small changes but you are doing good.
• 30-50%- Your doing alright buy could definitely use some improvement.
• 50-70%- Your doing bad and need to improve some elements of your website
• 70-100*- If you are up here, then I would consider doing something drastic.

As you can see anything relatively below 50 is not too bad, and anything over needs improvement. So, you might ask, what is my bounce rate? The bounce rate that I have for OwnBlogger is 46.32%. Now that is not bad, but as you can see, I still need a little bit of improvement.

Other areas that you may want to look at to see if your blog is performing to the best it can is:

1. Your number of visits that you are getting over a long period of time. If your blog is growing, you should be getting more visitors almost every day.
2. The average time that your visitors are spending on your blog. Obviously the higher amount, the better.
3. Lastly, The number of pages per visit.

While all these small little factors can be used to determine if your blog is growing or not, you will always have to keep in mind that, it just takes time to grow these things. To get a good bounce rate, increase your number of visits, increase the average time someone spends on your site, and the number of pageviews per visit, you will need to keep working on your blog. Keep adding content and promoting, and eventually all these numbers will improve and your stats will start to look good.

These are just a few ways that you can measure how your blog is growing using Google Analytics. If you are having a hard time keep tracking track of the numbers, just pull up one of the graphs that Google offers, that will compare your results over time. This way you can get a visual representation. I always found that to be easier then reading all these stupid numbers.

This is Part 2 on my series, Optimize Your Blog Using Web Analytics. In this post I will be talking about the different kinds of Web Analytics tools and how to get set up with them. If you liked this post, be sure to check out Part 1, Part 3 and Part 4 as well.

What Web Analytics Software Should I use?

There are quite a few Web Analytics software out there. There are free ones and there are paid ones. The free ones usually offer just limited details and usually don’t look as pretty as the paid ones. A few of these free softwares, will come with your hosting package. Many webhosts offer a few free web analytics programs, and tracking tools. Some examples of these tools are StatCounter, AWStats, Piwik, OneStat, Webalizer and countless others.

Now, most of these free analytic programs will get the job done, but usually lack the nice displays and the cool features that more expensive software provides. There is an exception to this however, Google analytics offers detailed reports all for a price that everyone can afford. It provides nice pictures, graphs and has some nice features that you can use to fully optimize your blog. This is probably the reason why it is commonly used the most.

For the majority of this series I will be sticking with free web analytic software simply because the majority of people don’t use paid web analytic software. By sticking with free analytic software, I feel that I will be able to help more people out. I will be using Google Analytics the majority of the time, just like many others.

Installing Web Analytic Software.

Most web analytic software is fairly easy to install. If you have them set up on your hosting account, then all you probably have to do is enter the URL of your website and click a button. However, if you are using free software that is not offered by your hosting company, you will probably need to post some kind of code on your website.

Here I will go through the steps for installing Google Analytics on your blog. It is fairly straight forward but just for the sake of it, I will provide pictures and detailed descriptions.

The first thing you will want to do is log into your Google Analytics account. Once you are in there, you need to click on “add new website profile.” Once you are done that, you need to enter all of your site information.

(NOTE: click on the images for a full view)

Once you are done entering all of your site information, you will be given your site code as shown below

Now, this is where it might get confusing if you are totally new to this kind of thing. You will need to take this code and paste it on your website. What you will need to do now is go into your Word Press account. Once you are signed in, click on the design tab. Then go to theme editor, and on the right side of your screen, you should see something like Footer.php. Click that, and your screen should look something like this.

Scroll all the way done. Once you are at the bottom, you should see an area that looks like this:

What you will need to do now is, take your code and paste it right above the </body> Tag. The end result should look something like this:

Once you are finished that, hit update file and you are all done and ready. Now you will have Google Analytics on your blog and you should be good to go.

It will usually take 1 to 5 hours until you start seeing data being reported. Keep in mind though that, it takes about 24 hours for the reporting to be completely fully accurate.

As a final last note on this tutorial, If for some reason you still can’t figure out how to install Google Analytics, then you still have hope. There is a WordPress Plugin that does it for you. The only reason why I recommend that you do it manually is because, plugins slow down the performance of your website. You will want to keep the amount of plugins you have on your blog to a minimum.

If you enjoyed this post then stay tuned for my next post in the series, Using Web Analytics To Optimize Your Blog. If you want an introductory to this series, then read Using Web Analytics To Optimize Your Blog: Part 1.