Google Me

Someone last week asked me how I knew how many visitors I had each day to my blog. There are lots of tools you can use but I, like most use Google Analytics. I am not going to go into details on how to install it but if you need help here is a good beginner's guide from Mahalo for getting your account set up and figuring out how to initially use it. I rarely refer to Google's help section since I find it to be geared towards a user with a much more techie vocab than myself. When I need help I just google the question I have and usually someone else has translated directions it in a more user friendly way than Google itself. The above Google Love print is by MARCOART ONLINE and combines the Beatles Dynasty with the Google dynasty.

You are going to want to eliminate your own ISP address from your statistics if you are anything like me and check your blog over 20 times a day. You can add a filter from as many computers that you use, I have one for my work and home computers. WeepingWillowyOne on Artfire did a good step by step guide for how to do this here.

Last month I noticed a very alarming trend in my blog stats. I was experiencing a negative % change for the first time ever. I knew intellectually that it was because I had such a huge increase in numbers the month before while running the Lose the Winter Blues Contest. I had done tons of promoting and was linked on all kinds of contest blogs and was still seeing some residual effects of this throughout March. But it was so depressing to see my losses there, especially as they actually got as high as 18% at one point. That is when I jumped into action to try to stop the bleeding, so to speak. I threw myself into Twitter and StumbleUpon and was recently able to turn the corner. I thought it might be interesting for some of you to see where my traffic comes from. If you don't even like looking at your own stats then feel free to move along.

One of the first things I always look at when reviewing my Statistics is where my traffic is coming from. I think this is the most important resource since it helps us to see where we should or shouldn't be putting our energy. To find the whole list you go to your Traffic Sources Overview and click on view full report. I usually have over 70 referring sites, with some of them only referring a few but every one counts as a potential new follower.

Here are my top 10 referring sources from the past 30 days. The first number is the total number of visitors from that site, the second is the average number of page views per visit, The third is the average length of the visit, and the last is the percentage of new visitors.

1.	entrecard.com / referral	2,678	1.06	00:00:25	30.96%
2.	(direct) / (none)	1,217	1.11	00:00:36	54.31%
3.	blogger.com / referral	358	2.61	00:08:32	11.45%
4.	adn.entrecard.com / referral	266	1.06	00:00:30	43.98%
5.	sortafloweringdesigns.com / referral	179	1.12	00:00:49	41.90%
6.	twitter.com / referral	146	1.58	00:03:50	73.97%
7.	etsy.com / referral	80	1.12	00:00:22	81.25%
8.	stumbleupon.com / referral	74	1.19	00:00:31	98.65%
9.	google / organic	72	1.58	00:01:17	93.06%
10.	photodito.com / referral	33	1.03	00:00:39	33.33%

It's no surprise that my biggest source is entrecard. I put the most amount of time into promoting my blog with them. Even with all of their bumps and advertising debacles during the past month they are still the best way to promote your blog that I know of. I no longer do my drops on the weekend since it was taking away too much time from creating so I do have a pretty big drop in viewers by Sunday but I'm ok with that.

The twitter stats are very interesting for me. Those are actually very solid new numbers since I really just started working the twitter last week. Before that I had less than 20 views from them. What is promising from those stats is that they are actually spending some time here, with an average of almost 4 minutes.

The StumbleUpon numbers are about what I thought they would be. A lot of new visitors but not necessarily the same quality. They had an average of only 31 seconds. I will continue to submit some pages to them and it is a good way to search for interesting diversions.

I have been using the etsy forums to promote my blog some the past few weeks too which is where the etsy views are coming from. I'm not real impressed with the quality of these views as the average time is only 22 seconds but I think I will continue to do it as I have time. I also find some great blogs by participating in those threads which is part of the fun.

Do you have any interesting trends or thoughts on Google Analytics you would like to share?

Thoughts on Social Bookmarking

I recently did a post about blog directories vs. social networking sites. I know that I am always a bit behind the techie trends but I am just now getting into the social bookmarking world which is another layer of these two areas. For those of you that are even a few steps behind me About.com has some really useful howtos on the subject. The above less techie handmade bookmark is from HAWKMANSTUDIOS. It was made with recycled components and is an elegant way to mark your spot.

My first venture into social bookmarking was signing up for delicious. You can view my bookmarks on delicious here. What I like best about this site is that you can view the websites you mark from any computer anywhere. If I mark a site on my home computer but I want to use it the next day at work than I'm out of luck, but if I mark it on delicious than I can access it anywhere. I can also search the site by tags which is a unique method of search unlike any other type of search engine.

You can also share your tags and bookmarks with friends or any like minded folks who like the same stuff you do. You can search for other great websites through tags that people like you have bookmarked. I think that it helps to make the world wide web a more manageable and homey place to visit.

StumbleUpon is another useful social bookmarking site that can also be used for promotion. Everything I've read about sites like delicious say that you should not use it for promotional purposes or you will be considered a spammer. But StumbleUpon and another popular site called Digg are set up a bit differently. Along with the bookmarking capabilities you can submit web pages to the site with a review and they will then be circulated among like minded searchers. You can stumble with a targeted search or just spend a few hours stumbling through interesting sites that have been recommended by fellow users. While doing "research" for this post this morning I got sucked into Stumble and could see myself easily wasting an entire day in its grasp. The more time you spend on Stumble the more street cred you earn so that time could eventually help your promotional efforts.

I read somewhere that for every 5 sites that you submit you should add one of your own pages with the intent of getting all of your content eventually into the system. The more people that stumble your web page the more visibility it will have and hopefully more people will find your content interesting to mark in someway. If you manage to make the front page of Digg or StumbleUpon than you will hit pay dirt in the world of visitors to your site, which could hopefully turn into sales. These sites can also help you build up those all important backlinks that are necessary for SEO.

For bloggers it is important to make your site as easy to mark with the social bookmarking sites as possible. I have recently added the widget from the free site AddThis to the end of each of my posts and in the top of my left column so that people can easily add a page or the entire site to any of the major bookmarking sites. I would love it if you would add whatever content you enjoy to the bookmarking sites you use. This feature makes it easy and fast to bookmark and share any page with the world.