Everybody should have their blogs up and running. If you build it, they will come! Actually, not really. Think of your blog as your business. If you were to go out and build a physical business, chances are someone would see it and you might get some people passing by to be interested in checking you out. However, imagine if you were to build your business in the middle of the Saharan desert. How many people are going to be able to find you out in the middle of nowhere? Right now your blog is in the middle of the Saharan. The rest of the semester we are going to use Internet marketing, and social media tools to bring your blog closer to main street, USA.
Before we can even think of marketing our blogs, we need some eyes. At your physical store, you can watch people come in and out and you can ask them how they found you. On the Internet you cannot see who is visiting your site unless you install tracking software which is more commonly known as analytics. Analytic packages store cookies on the computer of people who visit your site when they first arrive. If they click to another page, the cookie is updated. If they take a look at your site, and it is horrible and they click away, the cookie will know. This is known as a bounce. If you have ten people visit your site and 3 bounce, then your bounce rate is rate is 30%. You want the lowest bounce rate possible.
Additionally, analytics track thousands of different things. Where is the person visiting from (the country, state, city, and network)? What speed is their connection? How did they find you (directly, organically, or referral)? How did they navigate through your site? How long did they visit for? How long were they on each page? Etc, etc, etc….
For this week, we are going to install Google analytics. It is free and very powerful. This is not hard to install at all. If it is your first time, then you may need to play with it a bit. With experience, it takes less than 2 minutes. Simply do the following:
1) Go to Google.com/analytics.
2) Sign up for a Google account if needed
3) Install analytics by following their instructions
The next thing you want to do is to make your blog searchable by the search engines. If you create a blog, how does Google know you created it? If Google doesn’t know you created it then how are they going to be able to display your blog in search results? Try googling you URL. Does it come up? (If you have wordpress it might because wordpress links to your blog). Now try Googling www.blogginginsights.blogspot.com. You can see that the search engine can find it no problem. The easiest way to get your blog indexed in the search engines is to submit them manually. It takes less than 30 seconds for each major directory.
1) http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl
2) http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx
Also: If you didn’t submit it to these sites manually then your site would still be found eventually if someone were to link to you. When Google crawls the Internet it follows links and thus you would be found within a couple of weeks.
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