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My name is Suzanne and I’m obsessed with stats.  Are you?  It can make you crazy sometimes, but it’s not all bad!  While an addiction to stats can lead to the occasional bout with insanity, like wondering why your
traffic is lower on Thursdays (traffic patterns vary widely and sometimes mysteriously), a fascination with website statistics is worth cultivating.  A thorough knowledge of your site’s traffic patterns and behaviors can help you understand what’s working, and what’s not, on your site.  What is your traffic most interested in?  Where does your traffic come from?   What pages do they hit most frequently?  If you use affiliate advertising, you can even figure out which advertising draws the most clicks and follow through by placing more of like ads on your site to pull in more clicks–and therefore more potential purchases.

How to best follow your stats leaves you facing a maze of analytic tools, all of which seem to yield different numbers for the very same site.  Google Analytics (through Google), Awstats (through your cpanel), and Short Stat (a WordPress plugin) are just a few of your decent options–and I use them all–but the absolute favorite now in my stats-obsessing arsenal is Mint.  Mint was developed by the creators of Short Stat and is considered the “pro” version of Short Stat.  Unlike Short Stat, it isn’t a plugin installed in your WordPress admin so it doesn’t slow your site down, hogging resources.  Mint is installed directly through your domain.  It isn’t free–there’s a $30 charge to sign up (additional plugins, called Pepper, to extend your Mint program’s capabilities, are free.)  In my opinion, Mint is well worth the fee.

Mint’s flexible dashboard, configured to your preferences, gives you everything you could possibly want to know to know at a single glance.  Check your visits by past day, past week, past month, past year, totals, uniques, even by the hour.  Watch referrers–newest unique, most recent, repeat, domains.  Keep up with pageviews by the past hour up to the past 72 hours, as well as by most popular, most recent, and most watched.  You can hook your Feedburner right in there to read those stats by past week, past month, past year, subscribers and hits, and most popular Feedburner items.  Get your Technorati ranking, along with inbound blog and other inbound links.  See your searches–how people find your site–by most recent and most popular, and find out what links people use to leave your site.

Install Mint yourself using their easy installation guide and FAQs.  (There’s also a Mint forum for further assistance.)  Or, have your designer install Mint.

What I love about Mint–the attractive, user-friendly, at-a-glance display all on one page and, most of all, its real-time function.  If you love stats, you’ll be head-over-heels for Mint.  So go have a Mint, and don’t forget the Pepper.  Me, I’ve got to go look at my Mint again and see what’s been going on at my site in the past five minutes…..

Tags: Spotlight by Suzanne McMinn
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In our last article Suzanne explained WHY you should advertise your blog, and some advertising companies you can use to place your ads. They offer the advantage that the advertising companies provide the statistics for how the blog is doing. They list the traffic and pageviews of the blogs.

I’m going to look at another option. Blogs that offer advertising directly through the blogger. No middleman. Which sometimes means you’ll get the same traffic exposure for lower prices. These blogs usually have a link to “advertise here” or “advertising rates” or something similar. Some will have a page and post their rates. Some will list off their statistics such as visitors or pageviews per week. While you can take them at their word, you should do some other research on your own regarding the popularity of their website.

Things to consider:

1) Do they have an active blog? Do they post daily or at least regularly?

2) Do they have a comment section with a lot of activity? How many comments do they get on their posts?
[Read more →]

Tags: How to Blog, Marketing by Kacey
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Just the title of this post stuns some of you, right?  Advertise your blog?  Yes, advertise your blog.  Why? 

Advertising your blog brings readers to your website!  Once at your website, readers take their time, poke around, check out your excerpts, get to know your name, and buy your book.  It’s back-door promotion that works–and is less expensive than you think.  Pull new readers in with an active, entertaining daily blog and those readers will stick around long enough to be drawn to your books far more than a straightforward advertisement for the book.

Now you know the why, here’s the where, the when, the what, and the how.

Where:  Choose blogs that attract an audience that is similar to the type of audience that enjoys your books.  In most cases, this will mean a blog that attracts women.  If you write inspirational romances or books with rural settings, you might want to choose blogs with a Christian slant or country living blogs.  If you write comedies, look for humorous blogs.  If you write family-centered stories, advertise on a mommy blog.  If you write suspense and adventure, you might choose a blog with a contemporary edge to the writing.  And so on.  Analyze the writing style on the blog, the audience it attracts, and advertise accordingly.  Look at a blog’s traffic.  The more traffic a blog has, the more response (click-throughs) you’ll get, but the more traffic a blog has also tends to increase the price.  Advertising on a major blog is one way to go for high click-throughs, but another strategy is to put the same money into advertising on multiple smaller blogs for less money per blog.  Either way, you’ll reach a big audience for the same price.

When:  Anytime, but especially around the time of a book’s release.

What:  There are many types of advertising platforms.  Some I’ve used have included Adbrite, Federated Media, and BlogAds.  Visit their sites and use their systems to narrow your blog searches by categories that complement your writing style. 

How:  All of the above-mentioned platforms accept text ads, which are the simplest ads to create.  An example of a text ad I’ve used with great success is: “Visit a writer’s daily farmhouse journal for recipes, crafts, fun and country living.”  Notice I don’t advertise a book!  I’m advertising entertainment–free entertainment–to get them in the door.  BlogAds also offers the option of adding an image, which I find preferable in increasing click-throughs as images attract attention.  I use the image of a barn with chickens, alternating with an image of a funny sheep.  These images are designed to capture interest and reflect my Chickens in the Road country living blog.  (And I write stories in “country” settings, so this also attracts an audience geared toward my books.)

You can see examples of BlogAds on numerous sites including Crazy Aunt Purl and Biblical Womanhood Online.  You can also see BlogAds in action on my own website, Chickens in the Road, where I publish BlogAds as a side income.  See the “Become a Sponsor” links in my sidebar?  I offer three ad positions at varying price points for any budget.  You can find host blogs for BlogAds either through similar links in their sidebars or by visiting the BlogAds website and searching for blogs.

Promoting your blog instead of or in conjunction with your book, and using blogs as an advertising strategy, is the newest, smartest way to fast-track your traffic and your sales outside the box and bring in readers who might never hear about you otherwise.  Have fun–and let me know what you think!

Tags: Marketing by Suzanne McMinn
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We pause in our series of installing Wordpress. Wordpress just recently came out with version 2.5. I’m giving it a few weeks for the dust to settle, then I’ll install it on Dandelionblog. Then I’ll grab new screen shots for my tutorial on installing Wordpress. They’ve changed the Administration Panel quite a bit and many things are handled differently in this version. I’ll get back to the tutorial posts in a few weeks, when more is known about plugin compatibility, more bugs are ironed out, and more work arounds are figured out.

In the meantime, here is a list of some blogging forums you can visit to learn more about blogging.

Digital Point This is one of the first forums I visited to learn about the web. It’s grown into a huge forum with a lot of valuable information. You can also buy services from people there to help with your site. It has subcategories on Search Engines, Marketing, Business (such as legal issues, domain names, buying, selling & trading), Design and Development, and Product and Tools. [Read more →]

Tags: How to Blog by Kacey
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