2010 is here and it is time to kick start your blog into action to ensure that the year ahead it reaches its potential.

19,782 bloggers have participated in 31 Days to Build a Better Blog and the reports that I’m getting back from them are that it’s the ideal way to get a blog fired up in the new year.

Extra Inspiration and Instruction for the New Year for All 31DBBB buyers New and Old

Over the next 7 days only if you purchase the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog workbook I’m throwing in 3 great bonuses to help you get your blog going in the new year.

Bonus #1: Free Report: 9 Things to Do to Get Your Blog On Track in The New Year

Written in the style of 31DBBB this report talks you through 9 things that I do at the beginning of every new year. Each step gives you a practical exercise to go away and DO to help get your blog going in the right direction. Effectively it turns the 31 day workbook into a 40 day one!

Bonus #2: Podcast with Leo Babauta from Zen Habits

Regular readers of ProBlogger will know the wisdom and insight of Leo from Zen Habits. He’s grow his blog Zen Habits from nothing to being one of the most read self help blogs in the blogosphere in just a couple of years. He’s released a book (The Power of Less) off the back of his blog and has also since launched a number of other successful blogs, profitable e-books and other products off the back of his blog.

This 55 minute podcast interview with Leo goes through his history of blogging and explores much of his philosophy behind what he does including:

• his recent decisions to turn off comments on his blog
• how he comes up with ideas to write about
• his tips for launching e-books
• his decision to remove all but one ad on his blog
• tips on growing traffic and subscribers

There’s lots of good practical advice in this podcast – I came away from it with loads of ideas and inspiration myself and am sure many will benefit from it.

Bonus #3: Podcast with Neil Patel from QuickSprout

Neil Patel has built an amazing reputation and brand for himself in the last 3-4 years. He’s been a part of building two successful blogs but has also work with some amazing companies on their social media presence (like AOL, HP, Viacom and General Motors). He’s also been a part of helping blogs like TechCrunch rise to the power blogs that they are today.

Neil also is the co-founder of CrazyEgg and KissMetrics and has some great advice in this podcast in a number of areas including:

• Personal Branding
• SEO
• Productivity
• Building Traffic to Blogs

The podcast goes for 42 minutes and is not available anywhere else but to 31DBBB buyers.

7 Days to Get Your New Year Bonuses

These 3 free bonuses are exclusively for buyers of 31 Days to Build a Better Blog (both past and present) and they’re only available until midday on Tuesday 19 January – Melbourne time (that’s 8pm Eastern in the US on Monday 18th and 1am London time on Tuesday 19th).

The cost of the 31DBBB workbook is $19.95 – it contains 31 days of teaching and daily activities to help you create a dynamic blog. Make your purchase and get it and the 3 bonuses here.

If you have already purchased the workbook you should have received an email from me in the last 12 hours (sent to the PayPal email address you paid with) that contains details of where to get the bonuses. If you purchased it through SitePoint I’m working on getting you the bonuses too.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Get These 3 Free Bonuses by Buying 31 Days to Build a Better Blog – 7 Days Only

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See the full sized version of this video at YouTube – Expand Your Blog By Adding a Book.

A couple of weeks back I introduced a brainstorming exercise that gets bloggers to think about how to expand their blog. I followed that post up with an exploration of adding a forum to a blog as one good way to expand your blog.

Today In this video I continue this exploration of how to expand a blog by looking at adding a book to a blog. In it we look at the example of PostSecret and their new book PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death and God.

By ‘book’ I’m talking about ‘real’ or ‘hard cover’ books rather than ‘e-books’ (which I’ll cover later in the series).

As I mention in the video publishing a book is not going to be something most bloggers starting out can realistically achieve (although I’ve chatted to one quite new blogger recently who tells me that he’s just landed a publishing deal just a few months in) – however I do think it is something to keep in the back of your mind as you develop your blog.

Also mentioned in the video were the books by Photojojo and Lifehacker.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Books – How to Expand your Blog #2

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One of the techniques that I’ve employed in my blogging over the last 6 months behind the scenes is to create Reader Profiles (or Personas).

The technique is simply – open up a word document and begin to describe a type of reader that you’re either attempting to write for or who is already reading your blog. I’ll show you some examples of reader profiles that I have created below – but in short the task is to describe who they are, what their interests are, why they might be reading your blog and what their needs are.

The idea is that you end up with a picture of who you’re writing for that you can then use to inspire and inform you in your blogging.

Before I talk about the benefits of doing this and give a few thoughts on how to do one for your own blog – let me show you one that I created a while back for my photography site (click to enlarge).

The profile above describes one of the types of readers that we have on DPS – people who largely use their cameras to photograph their kids.

The profile describes why she reads DPS, some of her dreams, the type of photography she’s into, how else she uses the web, a little about her demographics, the level she’s at etc.

Here’s another one from a different type of reader at DPS:

Again – I’ve described another type of reader in a similar way to the first.

In each of these cases the reader profile is based upon a reader group already within the community – however this same exercise could be done with potential readers – or the type of person you want to read your blog if you’re just starting up a blog and don’t yet have readers.

Why Do I Create Reader Profiles?

Hopefully you can already see some of the benefits of these kinds of reader profiles – but let me list a few of the things I’ve enjoyed about having done this exercise:

• It Personalises the blogging experience – I find that having a person (real or pretend) in mind as I write reminds me that there are real people on the other end of my posts. There are people with faces, names and needs – I find it inspiring to visualise them as they read what I’m writing – it also helps me to write in a more personal tone.
• It informs my writing – having these kinds of personas before me and in mind as I write reminds me of some of the needs, problems and questions that readers might have. As a result I tend to write more practical posts that are written with real reader needs in mind. Often as I write I visualise the questions and reactions that these different readers might have to my posts and then try to build answers into what I’m writing based upon these questions and reactions.
• It identifies opportunities – I remember writing the first profile above (Grace) and having the realisation that quite a few of my readers have mentioned that they have dreams of one day making some money from their photography. This triggered me to start a section in our forum on making money with photography which has been really popular.
• It can be helpful for recruiting advertisers – often when talking with potential advertisers the question you’re asked is ‘what type of reader do you have’. Having these pre prepared personas can be really useful in answering that question. It also shows that you’ve thought about your readers and run a professional site.
• It identifies ways to connect with your readership - you’ll notice I’ve included details in the profiles on how the reader uses the web. It’s really useful to know what other sites your reader uses and what places of presence that they have as this can identify opportunities to identify places where people like the readers you already have (or those that you want) hang out.

How to Create a Reader Profile?

There are no real rules – you can see I’ve developed a certain style in my personas above. I added a picture to each of the type of person in the profile to further personalise it. I also tried to include information on these kinds of areas:

• Demographics
• Financial Situation
• Needs/Challenges
• How they use the Web
• Motivations for Reading DPS
• Experience with the topic – Level
• Dreams

I’m sure that others would include other types of information – if you’ve done this type of thing before please feel free to share your suggestions and tips in comments below.

Let me finish this post off with one last persona – again for DPS.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

How to Create Reader Profiles/Personas to Inspire and Inform Your Blogging

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Yesterday I share with readers an exercise to brainstorm 10 ways that they might expand their blog in the coming years.

The reason I suggest the exercise is not that there’s anything wrong with being ‘just a blog’ but because as I look at a lot of top blogs going around today it strikes me that many of them have evolved in different directions and now also include other mediums, areas and features that wouldn’t normally appear on a blog.

By no means is it essential to grow your blog in this way – but it certainly is a trend among many successful blogs.

Over the next few days I want to explore some of the ways that I see blogs being expanded. Hopefully in doing so it’ll give those wanting to grow the potential of their blog a little inspiration in how they might do it.

Expand Your Blog with a Forum

Lets kick things off with a way of expanding a blog that many bloggers will be quite familiar with – adding a forum to your blog. This can be done either as a free area or a paid or premium area where members pay a subscription to join it.

Examples of Blogs and Forums Working Well Together

1. Ars Technica – Major Tech blog Ars Technica has had a forum area operating for some time now.

I’m not sure how many members it has but as I write this it has over 700 signed in members on the forum and over 3500 guests viewing it.

Discussion areas cover most of the topics that the blog covers and in many areas there’s a lot of action (literally millions of posts).

2. Digital Photography School – I quickly added a forum area to my own photography blog not long after I started the site as I began to hear from readers that they didn’t want to just respond to what I had to say – but they wanted to start conversations, ask questions and share what they were learning themselves.

This forum doesn’t get as many unique visitors as the blog area on DPS but it does drive a lot of page views. It also converts pretty well in terms of advertising and over time has been picking up speed as more and more members join and as the site begins to grow in it’s search engine ranking.

Other Examples include:

• Steve Pavlina’s Forums
• Get Rich Slowly’s Forums
• SmashingMagazine’s Forums
• Post Secret’s Community Area

There are of course many others – feel free to suggest more in comments below.

Advantages of Forums

There are many advantages of starting a forum. Here are four that come to mind for me (and they just scratch the surface):

1. Increased reader engagement – one of the things that I noticed after starting the forum on DPS was that it seemed to hook people into the site for a longer period of time. Most blogs have a life cycle in terms of new readers where the average reader will eventually move on from the blog as their interests change, as their knowledge grows, as they master the topic being explored. However starting a membership or community focused area gives those who might move on from your blog a reason to stay connected – the relationships that they form. I know I have a few members of the DPS community who for one reason or another moved on from being blog readers but who are still central members of the forum.

The key thing is that forums require people to ‘sign up’ or become a member. This requires people to ‘buy in’ or invest a little something into your site which gives you a point of contact (you get email addresses etc) but also creates a point of connection and sense of ownership of your site in your reader. This extra engagement often leads to long term relationships and loyalty.

2. User Generated Content – one of the things I’ve been experimenting with in the DPS forum is to set up a ‘photography tutorials’ area. In this area we encourage readers to share what they’re learning about photography. It’s been a successful area of the forum for two reasons – firstly it creates useful content that other forum members enjoy but secondly it also has created content that I then can use on the blog.

Example: today I put together this post – 21 Great Reader Shots [And How They Took Them]

3. Increase Page Views – as mentioned above – my photography forum doesn’t get as many unique visitors to it as the blog area – but it does drive a lot of page views because each visitor who comes tends to view more pages per visit. This is fairly typical of forums as the way they’re set up tends to drive people to view multiple threads and view a thread multiple times as they interact with others. This can be a good way of making money via impression based advertising (although it can decrease the overall CPM rate if you’re using AdSense as someone viewing multiple pages is probably less likely to click ads).

What I find with having both a blog and forum is that there are some great cross promotional opportunities. In blog posts I’m constantly referring to threads in the forum that have examples of what I’m talking about or that I set up for people to share photos on the topic I’m talking about. Similarly in the forum we often point people with questions to tutorials in our forums. While some people tend to stay in one or the other of the areas – there’s a fair bit of cross over.

4. Appeal to a Different Type of Reader – I discovered a month or two into DPS forums that quite a few of those joining never read the blog area and that quite a few blog readers had little interest in using the forum. While some do use both areas it became evident to me that quite a few people preferred one medium over the other and that the two sections were appealing to two different types of people. I’m not sure if it’s to do with personality, demographic or learning style – but I guess we each find different mediums more appealing and starting a forum gives another option for people to connect with your site.

Challenges of Membership Areas

1. Moderation – most bloggers understand the challenge of moderating comments and protecting their blogs from spammers. On a blog comment moderation can be enough for some bloggers to give up and close comments – but on a forum there’s no such luxury because closing down comments kind of kills the whole purpose of a forum.

There are lots of tools and features of most forum platforms to help with this but in the end moderation takes a lot of time and effort. At DPS we have a growing team of volunteer moderators (lead by a paid community manager) to tackle this challenge. Much of their time is taken with dealing with spammers or trolls.

2. Community Building – our moderation team is not just there to police the negative stuff happening on the blog but also to grow/build the community. Building community doesn’t just happen – you can’t expect to just set up a forum area and automatically have community – it takes work, creativity and time.

3. Critical Mass – one of the biggest challenges with forums is having enough critical mass to be able to kick them off and attract other readers. This is why I didn’t start a forum on DPS immediately – I wanted to grow the blog’s readership first. I also started a Flickr group before the forum to grow a community there that I could then transition into a blog.

The other thing I did to get the forums active before going live was to invite a smaller group of my key commenters from the blog and long term newsletter subscribers to get early access to the forum so there was some activity there when the site went live.

Concluding Thoughts on Forums/Membership Areas

Forums are not easy. While they have many plusses they take a lot of work and time to build. They’re probably best suited to blogs with an established readership or list to help kick things off but also where the topics lend themselves to discussion, sharing of opinions or sharing of something else (eg. pictures).

Further Reading from the ProBlogger Archives on Forums

• 6 Tips on Adding a Forum to Your Blog
• 10 Mistakes that Will Kill a Forum (or a Blog)
• How I Increased Page Views on My Forum by 66.7% in a month
• Does Search Engine Optimisation Matter? (an example showcasing a forum)

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Forums – How to Expand Your Blog #1

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In this post Kevin Sanders shares some introductory reasons to take a hobby and blog about it. In effect this is the way that I personally got into blogging – there was no intent of my blogs being anything more than hobbies in my early days – but out of writing about things I was passionate about emerged a business…. Now it’s over to Kevin….

I’ve been going to the gym for about twenty years. I’m not a professional bodybuilder or fitness instructor – lifting weights is just a hobby of mine. But I’ve learned a lot over the years, and I’ve even trained some of my friends. I often give (free) advice about exercise, diet and supplements.

I asked myself this question about ten months ago: Why haven’t I created a fitness blog? I loved the topic, and I already knew the basics of blogging.

So I did it – I created StrongandFit.net. I started blogging, using tips I learned here at problogger.net. Slowly but surely, the traffic started coming. My fitness blog is now most visited (and most profitable) blog. My only regret is I didn’t start it sooner.

Here’s my point: I think there are millions of people who have untapped earning potential in their hobbies (a certain blogger’s digital photography hobby comes to mind). They’ve just never taken the time to share their valuable experiences and expertise online.

Here are some advantages to blogging about your hobby:

Ready-made niche

All the pros agree – you should choose a niche you are passionate about. Well, a hobby is something you already love enough to do with your free time. Seems like the perfect place to start!

Ready-made posts

You’ve probably already invested time, effort, and money into your hobby. Maybe you’ve even answered questions about it or shown others how to get involved. In other words, you probably already have dozens of posts swimming around in your head. All you have to do is take the time and write them down.

Ready-made affiliate opportunities

Most hobbies have books, magazines, equipment, or other products/services. You’ve probably already invested in some of these and formed an opinion regarding which are most valuable. In other words, you are already set to endorse certain products. Your reviews could earn money and help others make good choices.

Re-Energize your hobby

Blogging could get you more involved in something you’re already passionate about. It could even get you back into something you once enjoyed. The process of blogging (research, forums, etc) has an energy to it that ads to the fun.

No expertise necessary

What if you are a novice? No problem! Just be honest about it and invite others along your journey – share what you are doing. Here’s an example from the fitness niche: I’ve seen several blogs created by overweight individuals who want to document their weight loss journey. Some of these are quite inspirational.

If you never make money, it’s OK – its just a hobby

As Darren has pointed out, most of us probably won’t make big money from blogging. My blog is making a little money for me, but I’m nowhere near ready to quit my day job. But that’s the beauty of a hobby blog – you’ll have so much fun you’ll be willing to wait for the profits.

Final Thoughts:

You have a hobby, don’t you? What are you waiting for? Start a blog and monetize it! You have nothing to lose.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Hobby Blogs: Making Profits from your Hobby

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A Guest Post by Steve Martile from Freedom Education.

It’s normal to have a bad day, right? Well sure. But what if you have a bad week or a bad month?

I’ve been blogging for just over a year. And if there is one thing that I’ve learned is that you’ve got to be consistent. You’ve got to be consistently putting in an effort to build your blog. It won’t build itself.

So what about those bad days?

I’ve had them and they’re no good. You want to bounce back quickly. Get out of that rut. The quicker the better. So you can get back to blogging, life and other things.

And it all begins with the proper mindset. Here are 3 Mind Power Techniques to Become a Better Blogger:

Mind Power Technique #1: Overcome Writers Block With A Physical Change

When you’re writing and you get stuck, do this. Get up, walk around and sit in a different spot. See your screen from a different point of view. Sit in a different location and gain a new perspective.

Sound to hokey?

You see one thing that’s true for anyone is that a change in your mindset will change your physiology – your body posture, facial expressions, etc. When you think new thoughts, the chemicals in your brain change. But what many people don’t know is that the opposite is also true. A change in your physiology will also change the chemistry in your mind.

This the same reason why some writers will use exercise as a way to gain new insights and spark their creativity. A change in there physical state creates a change in their internal state. Body movement is an effective brain stimulator.

So get your body moving. Get up and go for a walk, get some exercise or just change locations to trigger that inner change – the place where you get all of those great ideas.

Mind Power Technique #2: Track Your Progress

I think over the past 3 months, 70% of the blog carnivals I submit to have either quit or stopped publishing. Which tells me one thing, that more than 7 out of 10 people will quit blogging within 3 months of starting. Don’t let that be you.

Keep your momentum going by using this mind power technique #2: track your progress.

Let me explain.

Recently, I spoke to a sales representative from iperceptions – a survey company that provides statistics and data for websites. What they do is survey people who navigate your website or blog. As part of their surveying process they tested different methods and found something really interesting.

What they did was add a status bar at the bottom of each survey page. That way users could see their progress as they went through the survey. When they did this, the survey completion rates increased by an astounding 67%!

Basically, this is what happened. When users new how well they were doing, they kept going. But if they didn’t have any signs of progress, they quit the survey altogether.

How can you use this technique with your blog?

Start tracking the traffic of your blog by creating a blog traffic diary. I learned this technique from Yaro Starak @ Entrepreneurs-Journey.com.

A blog diary is basically a way to track the unique visitors and pageviews for your blog. I thought it would be a good idea to track my Newsletter subscribers as well. Here’s a snap shot of my traffic and newsletter subscribers each month from November 08 to May 09.

What I found from following this process is that I instinctively became more proactive. I started to think ahead about how I could improve my traffic. If I saw that my unique visitors were down one month, then I would brainstorm ways to improve my performance: either by creating better content or putting more effort into my marketing.

I’ve been pretty active with my blog diary. I still keep it up to date because it’s such a great tool. I’ve pretty much shared what has worked for me and what has not worked over the past year. You can see my blog traffic diary here.

Mind Power Technique #3: Use Comparison To Give Yourself A Boost

Here’s a mistake I made from the very beginning. When I was surfing and commenting on other blogs I would compare myself to those A-List Bloggers:

ProBlogger, StevePavlina, Zenhabits and a few others.

This seemed harmless in the beginning. It started with subtle comments to myself like:

• “Oh, he has more RSS subscribers than me,”
• “She has third party ads on her site and I don’t,”
• “He writes way better than I do!”

Then after a while this self-talk started to grow like weeds in my mind. As time went by I found more and more weeds taking up the space in my head. Which put me in a real bad mood, to the point where I didn’t feel like doing anything anymore – not even blogging.

The important thing here is to catch this internal dialogue quickly. You never want to compare yourself to someone who is better than you (unless you’re looking for ways to improve).

If you’re going to compare, then compare yourself to someone who is worse than you. You can always find someone who is down a notch from your current position.

As you start to compare yourself to someone who is worse off, you’ll start to realize how good things are. You’ll start to feel better about yourself and your position. You’ll start to feel more confident. And when you feel more confident, you’ll start to take action.

If you’re going to compare, compare yourself against someone who is worse than you. At least that way you can bounce back quickly and get back to what you do best.

Steve is a Mind Power Coach and the creator of Freedom Education - Mind Power for Your Personal Growth.  He is also the author of the ebook, The Genius Within YOU.  You can download his ebook here.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

3 Mind Power Techniques to Become A Better Blogger

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Here’s a quick tip that I think a lot of bloggers could learn from – run a ‘town hall’ meeting on your blog.

The inspiration from this comes from Digg who are periodically run a ‘Town Hall’ webcast for their members.

The idea is simple – Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson from Digg periodically do a webcast for their members that gives information on the latest news at Digg as well as answering questions from their members. They’ve been running these on a quarterly basis at Digg for over a year now – you can see them all here.

OK – so what’s this got to do with your blog?

Here’s the thing – while Digg are obviously a lot bigger than your average blog and they have more resources to throw at creating these types of Town Hall webcasts – I think bloggers can learn from the idea.

While I’ve never used the term ‘town hall’ meeting on my blogs I have periodically done similar types of things for readers where I product updates on how the blogs are going, talk about new directions and take questions.

Benefits of Town Hall Type Meetings with Blog Readers

What I’ve found is that when you communicate these types of things it can have a real impact upon your reader community in a variety of ways:

• Reader Moral – every time I do this type of exercise I see signs of reader moral lifting.
• Reader Involvement – perhaps tied to the moral of your readers is that when you communicate with them about how you’re blog is going I’ve noticed that they often will get more involved with it.
• Gives Your Blog a ‘Face’ – one of the main benefits that I’ve noticed about these sorts of sessions when I’ve done them on video using Ustream is that it gives your blog a more personal edge. Readers get to see and hear what you’re like and come away feeling a different kind of connection than they get just reading your content.

<li>Clearing up Misconceptions – giving readers a chance to tell you what they think of your blog and to listen to your response can help clear up misconceptions that they might have about you or your site.

• Reader Involvement – getting readers involved in your blog in any way (even if it’s just asking a question or watching a video/web cast) means that they’re investing something of themselves into your blog. What comes out of these interactions can be all kinds of great ideas that they can give you – not to mention the things you might ask them to DO in promoting your community to their own network.
• Readers Using Your Blog Better – these sorts of ‘town hall’ meetings give you an opportunity to point out features of your blog that readers might not be aware of to help them to use it better. For example, pointing out the social media bookmarking buttons on your blog, explaining how to subscribe via RSS, showing off a newsletter you produce – all of these things can deepen reader engagement/satisfaction and help you grow your blog.

While not all of your readers will be interested on the behind the scenes goings on of your blog – some will.

How do you run a TownHall meeting?

There will be many variations on doing this type of thing and I encourage bloggers to find a medium and method that works best for them. Some that come straight to mind include:

• Live Video Web Cast – a live video streaming session like the guys at Digg do. They have a pretty professional set up that will be beyond most of us but it’s pretty easy to set up a video streaming session with a site like Ustream – then all you need to do is publicize it.
• Recorded Video Session – feeling nervous about a live call? Why not ask readers to submit questions ahead of time and then record your answers on video at your own time. Edit it up and put the video on YouTube (or your favorite video hosting site) and embed it on your blog.
• Live or Recorded Audio Sessions – the same two things can be done via audio. This is perhaps a little more accessible for your audience if they don’t have bandwidth for video – or is good for those who don’t like to see themselves on camera.
• Q&A Posts – a simpler option is to call for questions in a blog post and then to write another one with your answers.
• Chat Sessions – I know a few bloggers who have weekly times that they tell their readers they’ll be in a chat room attached to their blog. These sessions are for general chat but often have a Q&A section where readers ask about the topic of the blog as well as questions about the site.

Have you ever run a town hall type meeting for the readers of your blog? How did you do it? What were the challenges and benefits?

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Run a Town Hall Meeting on Your Blog and Increase Reader Engagement

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Today your task in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge is to spend some time looking at your blog’s statistics/metrics package to see what you can learn from it.

I encouraged participants in 31DBBB to make sure they had a metrics package installed on their blog before they started so I hope you have at least a month’s worth of stats to look at. If you’ve not got a stats package installed yet you should get one on your blog ASAP as it’ll help you track how it is performing.

Take some time out today to do a little analysis of your blog’s statistics. There is a wealth of information in them that can be incredibly useful.

Important Note: this exercise tends to become more useful over time. If this is the first time you do it then hopefully it’ll be illuminating – but the longer you have been collecting metrics on your blog the more useful it can become as you track trends and see patterns over time. As a result – this type of exercise should be something you build into your regular blogging routine (I try to do an in depth review each month).

Some of you will be used to doing this type of analysis so you won’t need a lot of help in doing it – but if you’re new to this here are a few metrics to pay particular attention to:

1. Overall Visitors – this is the metric most of us probably look at the most so I’ll start with it. Are visitor numbers on the increase or decrease? What might be the reasons for these changes (ie could it be tied to frequency of posting, topics, other sites links etc).
2. Most Popular Posts – what posts are being read more than other posts? Knowing this is important for a couple of reasons. For starters it gives you a hint of what topics you could write more on – but secondly it gives you some key pages on your site to optimize (ie think about how you can drive people from these posts deeper into your blog).
3. Referral Stats – what sites are sending you the most traffic? If it’s another blog or site, perhaps you could develop a relationship with them to see this increase. If it’s Search Engines, how can you adapt the posts to see it rise even more using on page SEO techniques).
4. What Questions are being asked? – what questions are readers typing into search engines to find your blog? These could make great future posts (learn more about how to do this here).
5. What Keywords are sending traffic? – knowing the keywords that people search for to find your site is very useful. It helps you to know how to optimize your blog for SEO even better and can give hints on what content to write more of.
6. What seasonal traffic is there? – are there any seasonal trends that you should be aware of and could use to capture more traffic? What caused the bumps in traffic and how can you prepare yourself better for next time those conditions might happen again (read more on seasonal traffic and how to capture it).
7. Daily/Weekly Trends – another trend to watch is what traffic does over different periods of time. What are the most popular times of day? What days of the week are most popular? Knowing this gives you ammunition in planning when to release new posts.
8. What’s Your Bounce Rate? – metrics packages like Google Analytics provide you with a ‘bounce rate’ stat which measures how many people arrive at your site and then leave again without viewing any extra pages. I find this a key metric to watch and attempt to change. Set yourself some goals to get this rate down and the page views viewed per visitor up by making your blog sticky.
9. Page Views Per Visit – Similarly to ‘Bounce Rate’ – This is a good one to watch over time as it shows you whether those coming to your blog are going deep into your blog’s content or simply looking at the page they arrive on. My goal on my blogs is to see this number increase over time. For tips on how to increase page views also check out 4 Quick and Simple Ways to Increase Page Views on Your Blog.
10. Time on Site – Another stat that can give you a sense on whether readers are engaging with your content is to look at how long they stay on your blog. The longer they are staying the more likely it is that they’re reading, commenting and interacting (or that they forgot to close their browser).
11. New vs Returning Visitors – This one gives you a sense of whether you’re succeeding in converting people to loyal visitors.
12. RSS Stats – If you’re using a tool like Feedburner to manage your RSS feeds you’ll have access to more useful information. Feedburner provides you with the number of subscribers but also what posts people are reading most of (again showing you what content people are engaging with most which gives you some good information on what type of content is working best).
13. Outbound Clicks – Not every metrics package will give you this type of information but if you have access to it knowing what links on your blog people are clicking to leave it can be very useful. It’s not that you want to stop people clicking links – but knowing what links they click on can give you some useful information on what motivates your readers to click a link and what type of information they want more of.
14. Where are People Clicking on Your Page – not all stats packages track this but some like Google Analytics or packages specifically for it like CrazyEgg will create heatmaps or visual pictures of what people click on when they visit your blog. I find CrazyEgg’s heatmaps better than Google Analytics but you do need to set it up on specific pages of your blog to be able to see them. This is very useful information when thinking about the design and layout of your blog but also can help you test how to layout posts to see where people click.
15. Exit Pages – A similar metric is knowing what page on your blog people are leaving from. A couple of years ago I checked my stats and noticed that the % of people leaving a particular page on my blog was triple other pages. When I investigated I found that the page had some very bad formatting issues on it that made the page almost unreadable – I was able to fix the problem and keep more readers engaged as a result.
16. Monetization Stats – many of you are looking to make money from your blogs so it’s also important to pay attention to any stats you have at your disposal on how your blog is performing in this way. The metrics you have at your disposal will vary from income stream to income stream but if possible try to work out where on your blog the income is coming from specifically. For example if you use Google Analytics and AdSense you’ll be able to see what specific pages are earning more than others. Otherwise – use what ever channel or tracking options your ad network or affiliate program gives you to help you work out which posts are performing.
17. Other Stats – There are plenty of other stats that can be revealing when you dig into them. Knowing the Geographic regions of your readers can be helpful as you think about content but also is useful if you’re dealing with advertisers, knowing the screen resolution and browsers people are using to view your site is good from a design perspective etc. Also worth doing from time to time is looking at other stats like how many posts you’ve done over time (post frequency can help you monitor how you’re performing personally) and how many comments you’ve had on your blog over a period of time and on which posts (which can be a great indicator of what kind of posts are working best on your blog and how reader engagement is going).

What Would You Add?

There are many other types of metrics that most statistics packages will provide you with. Feel free to share the metrics that you check most often and how you use them to improve your blog in comments below. Also let us know what tools you are using to check your blog’s metrics.

Warning: Don’t become a stats addict. Most new bloggers go through a period where they are checking their stats every hour. This is pretty normal but over time can add up to a lot of wasted time.

I personally try to do a quick check of stats throughout the day 2-3 times (just looking at traffic numbers mainly to see if there’s any spike in traffic that I need to know about) and then month put aside an hour or two to go deeper and look at some of the above statistics.

Further Reading: Using Google Analytics to Compare Traffic from Different Periods of Time – in this post I use the ‘compare’ feature on Google Analytics to track how my blog is going over time by comparing it to other periods.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

17 Statistics to Monitor on Your Blog [Day 30 - 31DBBB]

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When was the last time you made someone else’s blog better?

Today’s task in the 31 Days to Build a Better Blog is to do just that – to improve a blog that is not yours.

Most bloggers naturally spend the vast majority of their time improving their own blogs – but there can be a lot of good things happen when you spend time on other people’s blogs making them better in one way or another.

I think it’s fairly obvious why it can be worth helping another blogger achieve their goals so won’t go into it too much except to say that there’s not many ways to make a better impression on another blogger than to help them achieve their goals for their blog. When you do this any number of benefits can come your way.

The question is – how do you improve someone else’s blog?

I’d love to hear your suggestions on this in comments below but let me mention just a few:

• write a guest post – write a high quality post that will be useful to another blogs readers
• leave helpful and insightful comments
• link to the blog – share your readers with them
• promote the blog in social media – get a social bookmarking campaign going for them
• recommend that your readers subscribe to them
• email the blogger with some suggested topics you’d love to see them cover
• introduce them to a potential advertiser
• share with them an affiliate program that has worked for you
• write an email telling the blogger how you found one of their posts helpful

Really there is no limit to the ways that you can help another blogger improve their blog. The key is to ask yourself what their needs might be and attempt to fulfill those needs in some way.

The key with this exercise is to do something significant for the other blog. Don’t just leave a comment on 50 blogs today – spend some significant time focusing your energy on one other blog in your niche.

If it doesn’t go noticed by the other blogger don’t despair – hopefully in doing something for others you’ll learn something for yourself also, as well as getting a little good karma in the process!

Let us know what good deed you do for another blogger today in comments below!

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Improve Another Blog [Day 26 - 31DBBB]

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Today’s task in the 31 Days to build a better blog project is a ‘writing’ oriented task and it is all about solving problems.

Your task is to write a post that solves a problem that your readers (or potential readers) have.

This is a task that most successful bloggers build into every single day of their blogging. Here’s their motivation:

If you’ve solving problems:

1. you’ll make an impression upon people
2. those people are more likely to return to your blog
3. those people are more likely to tell others about your blog

How to Identify Problems to Solve:

For some bloggers identifying a problem that their readers will have is easy – they have a lot of readers and have their finger on the pulse of their needs. However it isn’t that easy for many newer bloggers with smaller and less vocal readers.

7 Methods for Identifying Problems to Solve on Your Blog

1. Solve Your Own Problems

My favorite way to identify needs and problems of others is to take note of my own. In my experience, when I have a problem I’m not likely to be alone. So instead of just solving your problems for yourself and moving on – why not capture the solution and add it to your blog so that others can benefit from it.

I was recently asked by a Twitter follower how she should start her blog. She was a little apprehensive of getting going and not sure how to start out. My answer was to write about a problem that she’d had and how she solved it. I can’t think of a much better way to get a blog going – right from day 1 it signals to readers that you’re interested in solving problems.

A great exercise to do to identify your own previous problems is to sit down with a notepad and pen or a laptop and text document and simply brainstorm all of the things you’ve learnt, overcome, discovered or solved when it comes to the topic that you cover on your list. Also list questions that you remember asking others about or problems that you might have researched yourself privately.

Having done this you should end up with a good list of potential posts to write on your blog.

2. Look for Questions in Search Referrals

Once your blog has been going for a while there are ways to tap into your readership and discover the problems that they have. One of these that is particularly useful when readers don’t verbalize to you their needs and problems is to look at how and why they access your blog (and what they do when they arrive).

One way to do this is to look at the terms that people are typing into search engines to arrive on your site. Sometimes the most common keywords can illuminate a topic that people have a need or problem in.

For example on my Twitter Tips blog I have the WP stats plugin installed. While not as advanced as some stats packages it does show me the most commonly used keywords that people arrive on my site having typed into search engines. Here’s a screenshot of part of the list of keywords:

These are just 7 of many hundreds of terms that people have typed into Google to and there are a few potential problems that people obviously have. Some way to know how to make a background image for Twitter, others want to know about twitter badges, others are looking for suggestions on who to follow on Twitter while others are tossing up between Twitter and Facebook while others are looking for information on how to customize Twitter.

From those 7 search terms I’ve identified 5 problems that people have on Twitter!

The same information can be gleaned from most web statistics packages such as Google Analytics.

Another great tool for identifying such terms and honing in particularly on ‘questions’ that people are asking when they arrive on your site is 103bees. To use it you need to be able to add a little javascript code to your blog’s footer or header – but once you’ve done that it’ll show you what keywords people are typing into search engines but also particularly highlight the questions people are asking.

So here on ProBlogger people have arrived on this site in the last few minutes asking:

Again – there are some real life ‘needs’ and problems that people have.

Keep in mind that with both of the above techniques you’re relying on your site ranking well for certain keywords that you’ve already used. So the reason I have people arriving on my blog searching for ‘how to be lucky‘ is because I’ve already written about that exact topic (so I probably don’t need to write another post on that exact topic). However you will find in the mix that people ask questions that you’ve not written specifically about.

3. Analyze Internal Searches

Another related way to find information on what your current readers problems and needs are is to watch what they search for when they are on your blog. This will show you what those arriving on your blog are still searching for once they’ve arrived. This is great because it shows you questions that they’re asking that you’ve often not already written about.

There are a few tools that show you internal search keywords. One I’ve is:

Lijit – Lijit is a search box that you put on your sidebar or in your navigation area instead of your normal search box. In many ways it performs the same functions as far as your readers are concerned in that it allows them to search your blog – however it also gives publishers a large array of useful information on what those searches are for. For example Lijit shows me that people on ProBlogger have searched for:

Not only that – it also produces a list of searches that people have done on your blog that you have NO RESULTS for:

While that list includes some rather ‘odd’ results it also produces some very useful information at times also and gives a snapshot into what readers are looking for information about!

4. Ask Readers for Questions

Another method that can be well worthwhile is to directly ask readers for their questions or about the needs and challenges that they face.

This of course assumes that you have some readers (it might not be for those just starting out) and assumes that they are comfortable in giving you a response.

There are a variety of ways of doing this:

• Write a post asking for questions
• Email a handful of most recent comment leavers asking if they have anything they need help with
• Set up a contact form that acts as a ‘question box’
• Run a Survey for readers
• Set up a sidebar and/or in post poll that gives people a set of options to show you their most pressing needs (this allows some anonymity)

I’ve done each of these and all can be well worth your time to do.

5. Look for Problems on other Sites

This one can be particularly good for those just starting out who don’t have current readers to ask. It simply involves finding a forum, blog or social networking site that is relevant to your niche and surfing through threads of conversation looking for the type of questions that people ask.

You’ll probably want to concentrate on doing this in larger sites that get the amount of comments needed for this but once you spend some time on most good sized forums you’ll see a range of questions that are asked over and over again.

6. Use Social Media to Gather Questions

A place that I personally am getting more and more inspiration for posts is Twitter and other social networking sites.

Twitter is a great place for collecting questions from real people with real needs and problems. I mainly do this in two ways:

1. Asking for Questions – every now and again I simply tweet that I’m looking for a few questions to base posts on.
2. Watch lists – I have a few keywords that I particularly look to track and monitor the use of on Twitter (I do this through my Twitter Client TweetDeck). I’ve written more about setting up watch lists earlier in 31DBBB but many of the times I see keywords used I see questions being asked. I try to answer these questions on Twitter but also often use them as inspiration for longer blog posts.

7. Ask ‘real life’ Friends and Family

Lastly – don’t forget your real life friends, family and work colleagues. Many of the conversations you have in day to day conversation reveal the types of struggles and challenges that people face. While you’ll want to keep private conversations private they could be a great source of inspiration for posts.

I actually find that family gatherings with extended family are a great time for me to tap into what people think about the topics that I write about. For example at one family gathering a family member asked me if he was holding his digital camera right. He was almost a little embarrassed to ask it as it was such a basic thing but as I was answering I realized that other beginners in using cameras would have the same question – hence How to Hold a Digital Camera came into being.

Post from: Blog Tips at ProBlogger.

Solve a Problem – 7 Ways to Identify Reader Problems [Day 16 - 31DBBB]

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