Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Blogging Tools

Okay, so I know that not all of you that read this are gonna be nearly as excited about these things as I am, but I will let you all in on a couple of my favorite little blogging tools.

First of all, the little side bar, where you add links to your friends and family.... I know that the only reason that I put those there were so that I could follow those links, and not have to remember the address every time I wanted to go there. It isn't necessarily so that other people can follow it. The problem with the links that I have there, is that I don't know when somebody has updated there blog, or posted some pictures. So the new tool that Blogspot added, is on the dashboard menu. I always thought that this menu was dumb, until they recently added this little option.
There is a little tab that says "Blogs that I follow." At the bottom of this tab is a button that says "Add." Click on it, then, in another window, go to the blog that you want to 'follow.' you copy and past the address into the original place, and copy it in. Now, when you go to your "Dashboard" it tells you who has updated their blog, and you can click from there onto the new posts. It sure beats clicking on 48 different links! (I know that there are other ways to do something similar, but this is the one I know how to do, and it easy) Hopefully this helps somebody.
The second little tool that I use, doesn't actually help me do anything in particular. It is called Google Analytics. It basically tracks information about your blog site. It will tell you pretty much anything that you want to know about the people that come to your site. For example, I just looked at Traffic Sources (how did people get to my blog). It tells me that in the past month 41 visitors linked here from woodburysfour.blogspot, 38 typed the address directly in the web address bar, 26 came from a google query, and 25 came from monteandbrittany.blogspot. It even goes more in depth too. Of the google searches, 15 of them were from the keywords "Jason and Sarah Woodbury," 5 from "woodbury adventure blogspot," and 2 came from the search "adam and kristen cole." If I change the time from the past month to say, the past year, it shoes that 3 people did a google search on "shoes galore" and came to our website. The 25 links from monteandbrittany shoots up to 158.


Other info that I get from this crazy google analytics thing is that 65.7% of visitors to our blog use internet explorer, the average time per visit has been 1minute and 12 seconds, and that 45.19% of our visitors are using a cable internet connection. There is also a bunch of other cool stuff, but I am sure you are all getting bored of reading this. It may also be that I am the only person that finds any of this cool. Now, the way to do this, is to go to google.com/analytics. You also need to open up your blogspot, customize, and at the bottom, you can "Add a Widget." I am not a complete expert on this, and I added this over a year ago, so I don't remember exactly. I am sure there is some sort of copy and paste involved in this process as well.

So before next time, will the 1.26% of you still on dialup upgrade to something a little faster?

4 comments:

Michelle said...

ooooh, can we get paid some commission on those 41 visitors!;-) . It is pretty cool stuff that google analytics. I keep putting off cutting and pasting all the blogs into the blogs I follow..... I keep waiting for kyle to do it for me. haha.
hopefully we'll see you guys REALLLLLY soon!!!

m

Sarah said...

Does anyone else think Jason should have majored in Statistics? He loves to look at stuff like this.

Teri's Life said...

I think that half of those people must have been me =) Almost every day I'm checking out who has anything new to say.

guess what I'll be adding to save me time? thanks for the hint!

Natalia said...

I love Google Analytics!

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