Increase Your Exposure

One of the quickest ways to increase your exposure is to guest blog on another blog. Not only does it bring traffic in from the visitors of the other site but it also allows you to post about topics that might be off topic or even more specific from the subject of your main blog.

Remember though, if you are blogging about a completely different topic than your main site, the visitors might not be interested in both subjects and it won't necessarily increase your traffic substantially. If will however give you more experience as well as a chance to write about other interests.

The biggest roadblock for most people though is finding a blog that will welcome your posts. For those just getting started or with limited options for guest blogging, there are several services which will happily take your blogging submissions.

HubPages: An online publishing ecosystem it calls posts "Hubs" and allows them to provide commentary or rich media utilizing images and videos. Since Hubs are free floating posts, you can write about any topic in any niche and are not tied to just one subject. Hubs can be organized into groups so that visitors can view Hubs from different authors on similar topics quickly and easily. Hubbers (HubPages authors) have a chance to share revenue from their posts as well by imputing their Google Adsense, Amazon Affiliates ID, or Commision Junction ID into the system. My favorite thing about HubPages is their Requests System. Through the Requests you can get great ideas for Hub topics by looking at what other people are hoping to read and not finding.

Squidoo - Squidoo is also a no long-term commitment service that allows you to publish individual posts on varied topics. Squidoo calls their version of the single post or page a Lens and also allows you to share the revenue or donate your portion to charity. Squidoo is very popular as a method of sending traffic to your blog.

Gather - Gather socializes the content it's members create allowing posts, images, and audio created by it's author community to come together for similar topics. Gather also shares the revenue from the ads that are displayed on your content that is published at their site.

Qassia - Qassia helps new bloggers promote their site by adding "intel" (their word for content) to the Qassia network. The more intel you contribute, the more "credits" you earn (backlinks) thereby the higher the rank for your site. Qassia also has a revenue sharing system promising 100% gross revenue to the authors of the intel. Unfortunately, Qassia is currently in a closed beta period so if you want to get started before it is opened to the public you will need a referal from someone who already has an account (you can click signup from a members' profile page).

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15 Stats Services to Track Your Site Visitors

While there are more than 15 stats providers out there, I wanted to compile a list of those that I have found to be the best or the most used by the communities. If you have found one that I missed, please leave a comment and tell me about it.

1. SiteMeter - Easy to install javascript or html tracking code with detailed tracking for a free account and more robust reports for the premium accounts. Stats can be emailed weekly as well as being viewable on the SiteMeter website.
2. ClickyWeb Analytics 2.0 - Javascript tracking code with a 2.0 feel to the reporting dashboard and a high level of detail available on your visitors. Easy integration into your blog as well as your WordPress site. Up to three domains for free with other packages available for purchase.
3. GoogleAnalytics - Javascript tracking code for stats analytics to compliment website adwords campaigns. "Google Analytics helps you find out what keywords attract your most desirable prospects, what advertising copy pulled the most responses, and what landing pages and content make the most money for you."
4. StatsCounter - Simple and free stats recording for your website providing hit counting, tracking, and web stats.
5. WordPress.com Stats - Stats plugin from WordPress.com which enables you to track visitors and stats from WordPress.com dashboard even on blogs hosted elsewhere. While free, you will need a WordPress.com account to get the API code to enable the stats.
6. Feedburner Stats - The Google purchase of Feedburner flipped all the pro services to a free for all status. Feedburner stats, once enabled tracks your feed subscriptions and hits and with a code insertion on your site, can track your site statistics as well.
7. Mint - Mint is an extensible, self-hosted web site analytics program. Its interface is an exercise in simplicity. Visits, referrers, popular pages and searches can all be taken in at a glance on Mint's flexible dashboard. Mint is not a free services and prices start at $30 per domain.
8. AWStats - AWStats is a free powerful and featureful tool that generates advanced web, streaming, ftp or mail server statistics, graphically. This log analyzer works as a CGI or from command line and shows you all possible information your log contains, in few graphical web pages. It uses a partial information file to be able to process large log files, often and quickly. It can analyze log files from all major server tools like Apache log files (NCSA combined/XLF/ELF log format or common/CLF log format), WebStar, IIS (W3C log format) and a lot of other web, proxy, wap, streaming servers, mail servers and some ftp servers. AWStats must be installed locally on the webserver or where ever it can access the webserver log files. AWStats is a free product.
   
9. Webalizer - The Webalizer is a fast, free web server log file analysis program that produces summaries of traffic from webserver log files. Webalizer is free software.
10. 103bees - It's an online service for webmasters, bloggers and internet marketers that is highly focused on natural search engine traffic analytics. 103bees provides real-time statistics and detailed information on search terms making it a great tool for search engine optimization (SEO) and internet marketing.
11. Firestats - A locally installed stats system supporting any PHP page (Standalone), Django Drupal, Gallery2, Gregarius, Joomla, MediaWiki, trac, WordPress, and WordPress MU. Firestats is free for non-commercial use.
12. GoStats - Packed with lots of great features, including information on page views, return visitors, and page popularity, this free hit counter is a quick and easy to use tool for determining how many people visit your website. A pro version is also available.
13. SlimStat - A free self hosted stats program originally part of ShortStat. A ready made WordPress plugin is available in WP-SlimStat.
14. Performancing Metrics - Is the exact same stats program as ClickyWeb Analytics 2.0 but running on the Performancing domain and on a different database for the backend. If you already use Performancing you can use your login here rather than create a new account at Clicky.
15. eXTReMe Tracking - Free tracking service showing numbers, percentages, stats, totals and averages from simple counting your visitors until tracking the keywords they use to find you.
    

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A Grain of Salt with Google Analytics

While not a huge fan of Google Analytics I find it a necessary evil for compiling my stats from all my sites. Typically, Google Analytics only reports a small fraction of my actual site traffic for Alternageek.com. Being a podcast we have traffic to our RSS feeds and that traffic gets missed. Also, if a browser is blocking javascript, that visitor won't get counted either. If a browser is blocking Google from setting a cookie when visiting your site, your number of uniques will be off from the actual number of uniques vs. returning visitors.

Take Google Analytics stats with a grain of salt. If you are running a stats system on your webserver that greps your webserver logs (Apache access logs and such) then your webserver reported numbers are going to be the most accurate numbers out there. Your webserver logs will report how many times it is requested to serve up content from your site.

Many advertising companies require you to have a third party stats reporting system because they just don't trust you to give accurate measurement. The problem with Google Analytics is that is requires javascript to be executed to count visitors. For a lot of websites, that might not be a major issue, but if you are a tech related site, you might see a huge discrepancy in the reports when looking at Google Analytics especially if your audience is mainly tech savy power users.

Browsers have the capability of blocking cookies and javascript from executing which will cause the stats reported back to Google to be inaccurate and possibly considerably lower than your actual traffic. Firefox addons such as No Script block execution of malicious scripts to protect users but also end up blocking your tracking code which mucks up your numbers.

What is a lowly blogger to do? My suggestion is to use more than one statistics system and use the average of them. Don't just pick three javascript stats systems, pick different systems with different reporting methods.

If you are hosting your own website, check with your host to see if they offer AWStats. AWStats is an open source application that uses your website access logs to report traffic and stats in a human readable format. I run BetterAWStats in addition to AWStats to make the layout of the reports even easier to use. Another self-hosted stats program available is Mint. Costs for Mint start at $30 per domain tracked.

A great third party reporting system is SiteMeter. Sitemeter has a javascript tracker and an html tracker so you can pick either to grab stats. You will lose referring site information for visitors if you don't use the javascript code but you will catch visitor counts for those who block the code. A basic account is free and there are commercial packages available for a fee which provide more robust reporting.

Another option is using a reporting system that uses an image to track hits rather than a script (such as SiteMeter's non javascript tracking code). There are browser options and plugins to block images as well so this method will have it's own list of pros and cons.

Overall, Google Analytics has it's advantages when using Google Adsense because it's integration is unparralled. If you are looking to track the effectiveness of your advertising campains Google Analytics can't be beat but if you want reliable traffic reporting, you should use other stats apps in addition to Google's.

Thursday: 15 Stats Services to Track your Visitors

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Beautiful Blogger Templates

While I use WordPress for most of my blogs, I decided to put blog(a)gory on Blogger to vary my experience a little bit. When it comes to themes and templates, I spend a lot of frustrating time trying to tweak Blogger to the look and feel that I get with WordPress themes. There are many reasons the Blogger fans love Blogger and there is no reason you shouldn't be able to get a wonderful design for your blog even if you aren't a XML or CSS wizard.

Here are two sites with beautiful Blogger templates to get you going on your way to a beautiful blog:

• 23 open source Blogger templates from Gecko & Fly
• Go, Blog's 10 of the Best Free Blogger Templates
  

WordPress.com Howto Video Tutorial

The following is a video on how to setup a WordPress.com account and start blogging with a free WordPress.com hosted blog. This is a long video (45 minutes) and is a great tutorial for getting started (even with some of the annoying little quips throughout the video).