Blog Name: Rich, Born and Became

Last Blog Date: Dec 31, 2011

Date of Testing:  1/12/2012 | Range: Dec 13, 2011 – Jan 11, 2012

# of Followers: 0  | # of Subscriptions: 12 via Feedburner

# of posts:  5 | # of pages:  4 | total # of comments: 0

Total of page views of all time (or in-range): 138

Type of content: Advice and tips in text and images.

Main Features:

• As I document my journey of spiritual growth, physical and mental health, I give recommendations on how to be Rich without money.

Past Social Marketing Plan:

1. Post to popular social networks equally or cross-posting
2. Non-frequent scheduled posting
3. Email subscriptions
4. Viewable on mobile devices
5. Google AdSense

Improvements using Google Analytics

Figure 1

 

Figure 2

Section 1: Audience Panel

Currently, only new visitors or unique visitors visit my site. This tells me two things:

I would then look at my subscriptions total. There are 12, but subscribers have unsubscribed on and off for the past two weeks (looking at my Feedburner account that gives me detailed stats on RSS Feed and Email Subscriptions). This also tells me that my posts are good enough to grab, but I need more posts to keep them coming back.

The solution would be to introduce Featurettes and produce more content in volume.

Section 2: Traffic sources

Figure 3

The most traffic my blog is getting is through direct traffic at 53.85%. Direct traffic means that visitors are typing in the URL of the site, using a bookmark, or embedded within emails, newsletters, signatures, etc.

The second highest traffic to my blog is referrals at 30.77%. These sources include my web presence.

Solutions:

Section 3: Content

Figure 4

You can really learn about a culture and its people by the things they search for. Surprisingly the posts coming in second to the most page views were about the holidays and giving positive advice and mental health wellbeing. In the time when people should be celebrating and having fun, people are searching for hope and advice to better themselves.

The average time on page is impressive at 2:33 minutes considering I only have 5 posts. My bounce rate is at 69% with Exit Percentage treading behind a good ratio is to keep the exit percentage much lower than bounce rate.

Solutions:

There are many free or costly web management tools that cater to certain projects. A lot of good ones are included with the blog you plan to host it from. It’s important to know what you want to do with your blog or website and make a clear list of how you want to get your content out there. Marketers do this for business, and now you can do it too for your own business or pleasure.

Task or Project Management can come in handy when using web analytics. Actually, web analytics are a part of Project Management especially during the Testing and Feedback phases. If you have project management skills, you’ll be a natural with web analytics. Hopefully these blog examples give you a clear understanding of where you need to look and how to manage your project.

Remember the four C’s of success for any website – Be Clear, Conscious and Creative with Content!

Other Web Analytic Tools:

Yahoo Web Analytics (http://web.analytics.yahoo.com/) – Free

Compete (compete.com) – Competitive Intelligence Tool – Price Vary

Twitializer (http://www.twitalyzer.com/) – Social Analytics – Free

4Q by iPerceptions (http://www.4qsurvey.com/) – Voice of Customer Tool – Free

Google WebMaster tools (https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en) – Free

Project and Task Management Platforms:

Astrid (astrid.com) – Social task management web platform – free

Producteev (producteev.com) – collaborative task management system with multiple projects – free

Trello (trello.com) – collaborative board task and project management tool – free

Mind-Mapping:

Freemind (freemind.sourceforge.net) – open-source mindmapp application, non-collaborative. View my review of Freemind.

Creately (http://creately.com/) – collaborative mindmapp web-based app.

Related articles

• How to Interpret Information Tracked in Web Analysis and Improve Your Blogs – Part 1 (vivaciousentrepreneur.wordpress.com)
• How to Interpret Information Tracked in Web Analysis and Improve Your Blogs – Part 3 (vivaciousentrepreneur.wordpress.com)
• How to Interpret Information Tracked in Web Analysis and Improve Your Blogs – Part 2 (vivaciousentrepreneur.wordpress.com)
• How to interpret information tracked in web analysis and improve your blogs – Part 4 (vivaciousentrepreneur.wordpress.com)

Blog Name: Cutie, the Triple D Gamer

Last Blog Date: Nov 30, 2011

Date of Testing: Jan 11, 2012   | Range: Dec 11, 2011 – Jan 11, 2012

# of Followers:  3   | # of Subscriptions:  20 via Feedburner

# of posts:  10 | # of pages:  4 | total # of comments: 6

Total of page views of all time (or in-range): 1,117 (in-range: 305)

Type of content:  Opinionated, interviews and advice-columns with text, video, audio and images.

Main Features:

• Sexually filtered content about video games and what morals and values are we taught about sex through games
• Researching, interviewing and reporting women in the video game industry. Discuss the lack of women in certain fields of the industry.
• Reporting the sexism in games
• Giving people advice about how to survive in a gamer relationship.

Past Social Marketing Plan:

1. Post to popular social networks equally or cross-posting.
2. Non-frequent scheduled posting
3. Email subscriptions
4. Viewable on mobile devices
5. Google AdSense

Improvements using Blogger

As stated earlier, Blogger Stats is a very basic web analytic tool and easy to analyze and interpret data. Looking at the overview [See Figure 1.1] I can easily see what stats I need to tweak:

Figure 1.1

• Number of posts
• Page views
  • Goals: The highest page views were gathered in November 2011 at 378. My goal therefore is to use this number as baselines for future months and gradually increase the page views.

• Traffic Sources [See Figure 1.2 and Figure 1.3]
  • Goals: Use search engines optimization, affiliates, referrals and trackbacks.
•  Audience [See Figure 1.4]
  • Goals: increase fans by state and countries using content-specific catering those areas. i.e., sharing insights about the views of Middle Eastern on sexism in games.

VIII. WordPress stats

Blog Name: Vivacious Entrepreneur

Last Blog Date: 1/9/2012

Date of Testing:  1/12/2012 | Range: Dec 12, 2011 – Jan 12, 2012

# of Followers:  0 | # of Subscriptions:  1 via Feedburner

# of posts: 5   | # of pages: 1   | total # of comments: 1

Total of page views of all time (or in-range): 7

Type of content: Advice, tips/tricks, FAQs, How-to/Manuals in business, marketing, Video game journalism, project management, and applications and software. Articles use text, video and images.

Main Features:

• Black Entrepreneur advice, tips and strategies for small business start-up
• My journey learning marketing, advertising and promoting in the video gaming industry
• My journey as a writer and journalist
• My struggles and successes with Project Management.
• Tips and Advice on how to use Web Analytics
• Superfan-type commentary about my favorite applications and software to do my projects and manage my business.

Past Social Marketing Plan:

1.         Post to popular social networks equally or cross-posting

2.         Non-frequent scheduled posting

3.         Email subscriptions

4.         Viewable on mobile devices

5.         Google AdSense

Improvements using WordPress Stats

Using the “at a glance” table, I can easily point out the lack of views and spaced out days from the views. This can be solved with more blog postings. If you post it then spread it, they will see and come.

Stat Sections

Figure 2

Referrer stats are like the traffic sources from blogger. These are clicks from another site that links to yours. My all-time referrers were social networks – Twitter and LinkedIn. To increase this list or at least get more shares, I have to regularity post to those same social networks. For Twitter, participants in hashtag conversations or Direct Messaging your audience with valuable information will help. For LinkedIn, posting new articles in related groups and contacting connections updating theme on valuable information.

Figure 3

The Search Terms Stats lists words or phrases that visitors used to find my blog when they searched. Unfortunately, this stat doesn’t show which search engines are bringing traffic. Under the referrer stats you might be able to find them. Also the blog can benefit from SEO tactics.

Figure 4

The Clicks Stats are bare. These stats display the total count and URL of outbound links the visitors clicked on my site. Embedding trackbacks and related content in each post should increase these stats. This also helps solves the inbound traffic sources referrers. It’s like killing two birds with one stone.

Figure 5

Making waves in the Top Posts and Pagesstats requires the use of superfans and subscribers. People want to love your content, so give them the best you can. The more marketing roads you take the increase of viewers.

Figure 6

The content should also strive to be interactive. This may help the Followers and Shares stats. People will share interesting and informative content. If yours are both, then it will be a successful blog. Also, content that is uncommon make great sharing brokers.

————————————————————-

View the first part of the series “How to interpret information tracked in web analysis and improve your blog” here.

Related articles

• How to Interpret Information Tracked in Web Analysis and Improve Your Blogs – Part 1 (vivaciousentrepreneur.wordpress.com)
• How to Interpret Information Tracked in Web Analysis and Improve Your Blogs – Part 2 (vivaciousentrepreneur.wordpress.com)
• How to Interpret Information Tracked in Web Analysis and Improve Your Blogs – Part 3 (vivaciousentrepreneur.wordpress.com)
• How to interpret information tracked in web analysis and improve your blogs – Part 4 (vivaciousentrepreneur.wordpress.com)

Before making improvements you need to understand 3 things:

• What the purpose of your blog is.
• What are the actions you want your users to take on your blog?
• What are your goals and milestones for the blog?

I answer these questions with my blog:

1)      The purpose of the blog “Cutie, the Triple D Gamer” is to tell the video game industry and its customers the good deeds and production of women professionals in gaming. To also discuss the impact of sexuality on video games and give advice and tips about Gamer Relationships.

2)      I want users to take these actions on my blog:

a)      Sign up for RSS Feeds

b)      Sign up for email newsletters

c)      Follow updates via social networks

d)     Ask questions for the advice columns

e)      Request reviews, interviews, investments, sponsorship or job opportunities

3)      The main goals for my blog:

a)      Generate revenue from ads using Google AdSense by March then Google Adwords by May 2012.

b)      Guest posting by March 2012

c)      Create opportunities to establish investors, affiliates, sponsors and client leads by June 2012

d)     Create an opportunity to attend gaming events and conferences by June 2012 for E3.

e)      Users are informed about a lot of my favorite areas and respond with their own experiences.

From these tips, I can customize a marketing strategy to complete my goals in a timely fashion. But first, understanding where you need to tweak is vital.

Tweaking

The basic tweaks for any blog come from the content itself. Just by posting more value-based content you notice increases in the following stats:

1. Number of subscriptions
2. Returning visits
3. Page views
4. Average time on site
5. Earnings by AdSense or Adwords through PPC

Making the appearance of the content and the blog even more user-friendly will increase the same stats. Implementing a social media marketing plan will increase these:

1. Unique visits
2. Average time on site
3. Sharing via social networks
4. Social engagements
5. Follower/friend on social networks
6. Comments

These increases in the big picture will help you build a community of superfans, customer base and/or open opportunities that you now seek with your blog.

My Content Management System

My content management system generally includes custom type posts with value-based content (critic-type, advice/tips) and opinionated content (ranting, mixture of value). This mix is what I like to call Featurettes. Featurettes are highly selective content that aims to satisfy users and interact with them. When it comes to using SEO and Meta tags, this type of content is the key to top rankings. Being a social media marketing consultant, I do a lot of these for my clients.

My schedule includes daily postings according to a chart I designed to split up the content.

Sample Chart

Legend: “X” is the letter representing Featurettes.

Imagine you have a pie that represents your blog and each slice represents a featurette. You can’t eat the whole pie at once, so you allocate which days you can eat it on. I don’t want all my users to get the full pie in one day. To further spread allocation, which leads to how to use social media to market your blog, pick a couple of Featurettes per social network.

Marketing Plan

The basics of a marketing plan are to get people to notice your content, like it, and ask more of it.

Getting Content Noticed

Indirectly

• Feeding content to social networks through a timeline
• Posting in forum topics with a signature link to your blog
• Print ads in gaming magazines, ads on television, radio television, podcast interview
• Attending events and conferences

Directly

• sending direct messages and shout-outs to people using social media
• email and newsletter campaigns
• customized ad platform in an app or website
• market research
• word of mouth
• personalized videos

The content will be gold. How do you know people like it?

• Using web analysis, you see your stats increase or decrease depending on what your goals are
• Increased community interaction on social networks. People resharing and talking about your blog through comments, etc.
• Viewers and listeners rise on podcasts and videos
• Newsletters and other email marketing tactics produce a high rate of opens and clicks on links
• Your ads are bringing in visitors and making money off ads though PPC and/or affiliate marketing accounts
• People are searching the web for your type of content often or at least leads back to your blog often

How will people request it?

• Subscriptions increasing tell you users like to read your content and stay on top of the latest posts
• Recommendations:  your content is recommended or people ask you advice because of your content
• Word of mouth: Viral awareness
• Opportunities for interviews, radio and TV spots, event invitations, jobs and more open up
• Readers actually thank you for your content

Blog Snapshots

VI. StatCounter Analysis

Blog Name: Enter the Q Ann

Last Blog Date: 12/16/2011

Date of Testing: Jan 11, 2012   | Range:  December 11, 2012 – Jan 11, 2012

# of Followers: 1   | # of Subscriptions:  3 via Feedburner

# of posts:  29 | # of pages:  3 | total # of comments: 3

Total of page views of all time (or in-range):  47

Note: Migration from Posterous.com in December.

Type of content: Media-oriented, download-accessible

Main Features:

• My value is my content itself that helps audience interests in interactive and regular entertainment
• My Favorite products including electronics and software.
• Share inserts of my fanfiction and short stories
• Write occasional news articles about gaming and other entertainment that I like.

Past Social Marketing Plan:

1.         Post to popular social networks equally or cross-posting.

2.         Non-frequent scheduled posting

3.         Email subscriptions

4.         Viewable on mobile devices

Improvements using StatCounter

Image 1

StatCounter can display summary data [View Image 1] in a bar graph, area graph or no graph types. Upon browsing the bar graph with colored blocks representing page loads, unique visits and returning visits I notice the page loads doubled than unique visits in Dec 2011 but dropped more than half in January 2012. The returning visits were slim to none.

Analysis:

1. My content in December was interesting enough to get doubled the pageloads (equate to activity on the site)
2. Significant changes to the next month suggest few content and lack of publicity.

The common solution:

1. Increase the number of posts and increase publicity. This solution will also bring in traffic sources and subscriptions.

StatCounter Tabs/Sections

The Popular Pages section list the heavily populated pages and posts on the blog with a total hit number.

The Entry Pages section lists the posts and pages that visitors enter the blog with. You can tell a lot by how the title of these pages and posts get visitors. What are these visitors looking for? Knowing what they want to read lets me adjust my content types and push out more related information.

The Exists Pages and Posts list the posts and pages visitors exit the blog with. To cover my exits, I have to understand the entry of them. There’s a different collation to the entry and exist posts and pages. This group shows almost the same posts and pages. That lets me know that visitors only wanted to read the one post/page or getting content from a reader that only displays that one post. Therefore I need to draw back visitors by listing more of my content links in the posts and pages.

The “Came From”, “Keyword Activity”, “Search” sections would display referrals, keyword search terms and search engine traffic. Unfortunately none recorded at the time of review. The solution to increase this data would be to use SEO tactics and trackbacks.

No Exit Links section activity. This shows outbound links. To increase this data would be to include outbound links in a sidebar.

Visitor Paths section (View Image 2) are really detailed with information on visitor IP Address, their location and where they went after visiting the site. It also tells you if that particular visitor is a returning visitor.

Image 2

Visitor Length section (View Image 3) is a real kicker. These stats display a pie chart with the length of time most visitors stayed. My chart displays a length of 5 seconds over 90% of visitors. That means visitors barely even read the posts. Spammers could have been at work here. To solve this issue, the green area needs to shrink to 0% or close to it. How you say? Produce a higher quality content and at frequent times.

Image 3

My Returning Visits stats are very low, but my first time visitors are higher. Not a surprise. The pie chart needs to display equal piece of first time and returning visitors

Recent Page Load activity can tell you of the date, time, system, browser, location, host name, web page, and referring link that a visitor has visited your blog. You can really notice the popularity of systems and browsers so you can further tailor ads and media types for specific areas.

Recent Visitor activity really narrows it down to the length of time per visitor. You can view the visitor map to see which countries see your content.

The Browsers tab (View Image 4) comes from the list of recent page load activity. Can I make my blog more accessible to other browsers? The same goes for system stats.

Image 4

The Downloads tab would display the numbers of downloads and activity from visitors to downloads.

——————————————————

View the first part of the series “How to interpret information tracked in web analysis and improve your blog” here.

Related articles

• How to Interpret Information Tracked in Web Analysis and Improve Your Blogs – Part 1 (vivaciousentrepreneur.wordpress.com)
• How to Interpret Information Tracked in Web Analysis and Improve Your Blogs – Part 2 (vivaciousentrepreneur.wordpress.com)
• How to Interpret Information Tracked in Web Analysis and Improve Your Blogs – Part 3 (vivaciousentrepreneur.wordpress.com)
• How to interpret information tracked in web analysis and improve your blogs – Part 4 (vivaciousentrepreneur.wordpress.com)

Table of Contents

Part 1

I. General Terms and Definitions

II. Web Analytics Applications – Summary

III. Informed Decisions Lead to Results

IV. Blog Snapshot Quick Analysis for all blogs

Part 2

V. Improvements Description

VI. StatCounter Analysis (Enter the QAnn Blog)

Part 3

VII. Blogger Stats (Cutie, Triple D Gamer)

VIII. WordPress Stats (Vivacious Entrepreneur)

Part 4

IX. Google Analytics (Rich, Born and Became)

X. Conclusion and Common solutions

I. General Terms and Definitions

IV. Blog Snapshot Quick Analysis

I manage a total of 4 blogs with two being on WordPress.com and the other two on Blogger. The two on WordPress.com were transferred from Posterous.com. All 4 of these blogs are relatively new and are going through content management and graphical design structures. What’s common among the blogs is a lack of content and blog postings therefore they all suffer from a lack of views compared to my overall reach across social networks.My blog snapshots are quick stat information with images of my blog mishaps taken from the web analysis tools. This helps you to understand what stats I am looking at and how I got informed information to improve my blogs. The next section is all about improving my blogs with the designated web analytic tool. Though any analytic tool can be used to help keep an eye on your blog stats, I’m killing two birds with one stone by picking tools and showing you how it works.

The structure will look like this:

I.    Blog Snapshot: includes the name of my blog, quick stats, type of content description, main features list and past social marketing plan.

II.   Improvements in detail using said Web Analytic Tool and complimentary images: Example, one of my blogs is designated to use WordPress Stat Management.

Before diving right in, I have to explain certain terms and why I am improving my blogs. Call it the Improvements Introduction which will be in Part 2 of the series.

Related articles

• How to Interpret Information Tracked in Web Analysis and Improve Your Blogs – Part 1 (vivaciousentrepreneur.wordpress.com)
• How to Interpret Information Tracked in Web Analysis and Improve Your Blogs – Part 2 (vivaciousentrepreneur.wordpress.com)
• How to Interpret Information Tracked in Web Analysis and Improve Your Blogs – Part 3 (vivaciousentrepreneur.wordpress.com)
• How to interpret information tracked in web analysis and improve your blogs – Part 4 (vivaciousentrepreneur.wordpress.com)

What’s so bad about resume writing? I’ll tell you. It takes up quite a bit of time and it’s not copy and paste. Let me explain what time is spent on resume writing. First, the last resume you had that got you your last job may not hold up in current times. Because of this, a bit of research is in order: What are the hottest trends in resume keywords and styles? What kinds of information should go into my resume for the 30-second view? After these questions are answered, more research is in order to find out what occupations you want to work.

A resume needs a main theme to work with better. Once its established, information can be gathered to use. If you don’t know what to write ask someone who already has a job or career in the same field you are pursuing to give you a sample resume. This helped my situation a lot and I used the sample resume to build 2 resumes of my own. Sample resumes found online may or may not be helpful. Using searches I came across very broad samples that I could not use.

Why were these sample resumes unable to be used?

Sample resumes are very broad even with the specific occupation you are looking for. Resume writing books will tell you that you need to show proven results. These results are in the form of monetary values and percentages. Personnel wants to see how much money you can save and gain for them. Everything else is taken down as a note.

A freelance writer, in some cases, are better than being tied down as a Reviewer or Editor especially in the video game industry for a particular website. Recently, I found myself exploring the possibilities of being a freelance writer by accepting positions as a contributing writer. I would be contributing news articles on certain topics and series rather than reviewing games and writing about it.

Reviewing games on a timely basis can get real stressful and take up lots of time.This is why it’s important for me to pick and choose which games I want to review for my mission. These days there’s so many gaming blogs/websites that it’s hard to find very good quality. You don’t want to choose a website that will get lost in the shuffle because of its recycled content. Therefore the only site it has going for it are it’s featured articles and perhaps its quick posted news on certain subjects.

Contributing definitely has its perks. You’ll gain experience, knowledge, networking contacts, and better writing techniques. Contributing on blogs or websites about a specific topic can really spice things up. For example, one of my blogs shares insights on how sexuality can influence video games and vice versa. I have one contributor on the team for a specific series. If contributors focus on that main topic than more visitors have something to look forward to as you don’t see much of that point of view anywhere else.

Also, reviewing games can be a challenge. You’ll have to review games you might not even like if you were to write for a publication. At least being a freelancer, you have more freedom and contribute what you can. Contributing can have its cons too. Let’s say a site is only about a specific topic(s) and there’s more than one writer. It will be hard to find more content to write about unless you became a real journalist and contacted people in charge of giving info about the topics you’re writing about.

In the end, it’s about what your financial goals are, your time management skills and general interest about what you want to write about and where.

Related articles

• Being a Contributing Writer Vs Reviewer/Editor (vivaciousentrepreneur.wordpress.com)
• 5 Things a Freelance Writer Can Do to Make You Look Better in 2012 (insatiablesolopreneur.com)

[ Posted Fri, 05 Aug 2011 01:24:02 ]

After being in awe about the success of Humble Indie Games Bundle #3, I have been contemplating starting my own indie games storefront using a similar concept. I wanted to start a video games store for a long time, but I didn’t have the funds or the proper equipment to do so, well until now. Now that I am working in the video games industry, I have more contacts to bounce ideas off. First thing is first – RESEARCH and type up a business proposal. I have no idea how to write a business proposal though I wrote an overview of what I want the company to be.

The Humble Bundle has everyone talking even the HATERS. You would think some developers are open to that idea, but they are not because they are selfish. It’s all about making the game for others to enjoy, hence why you want your game ‘out there’, correct? So why be stingy? The less money you charge the more people will buy it and you’ll make a killing. Humble Bundle made over $1.45M in a little over a week. Though Not sure how much went to charity and how much went to developers. But it’s still a heck of a lot. Plus those games are good. I brought and played some of those bundled games. Well worth my $10.00.

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve tried several desktop applications that would allow me to quickly and effectively jot down my thoughts into a cohesive appearance. To solve this problem, I was recommended mind-mapping software both on mobile and desktop. What is mind-mapping? Mind-mapping or concept-mapping is a technique used to create diagrams of the relationships between concepts, ideas and other useful information such as to-dos and task lists. It has been proven that mind-mapping software can improve studying/learning efficiency up to 15% over traditional note-taking.

There are several mind-mapping software in freeware and shareware. The most common freeware mind-mapping is FreeMind. I am using Freemind to map my personal and business branding ideas and concepts. Although FreeMind cannot collaborate online, its files are compatible with most other mind-mapping software. It can even be used with mobile applications.

Related articles

• Using Freemind application to brainstorm (vivaciousentrepreneur.wordpress.com)