Shameless plug

Time for a shameless plug. As you know, this whole blog is about being able to make just a little more income by blogging on the web. I'm no naive enough to believe this blogging thing will amount to anything substantial, but in the past week I've pulled in a whopping $17.01 with only three ads. That's enough to pay for family pizza night, so it's all good.

Anyway, if you visit and sign up for PayPerPost (I'm still waiting to hear from blogsvertise, not assignments yet, probably because my page ranks are zero) - please enter my email as the person who referred you. The email to use is bigsibling2k5 at gmail dot com (of course, turn all that into a 'real' email address - I just didn't want all the spam that will come with posting a real live email to this blog).

You can either go to www.payperpost.com or just click the snazzy graphic on the left there.

Oh, and welcome to my new visitor from Belgium! My grandfater came over from Belgium with his dad when he was just a tyke. His father was a cabinet maker named Charles Ablert Mouthuy (you're not related to him are you? I know it's a small country and all). Anyway, welcome and I hope you find good information here, and come back and tell all your friends!

As always, thanks for visiting!

Adding a domain to Google Analytics

When you first sign up for Google Analytics, it takes to the are where you add your first domain. You also setup a profile. You can have different profiles for different domains, multiple domains in one profile, and one domain in multiple profiles.

I think this is originally designed to monitor specific advertising and keyword returns for your website. You can add filters (to filter out your own IPs while looking at your own site), and set goals and monitor ROI (Return On Investment). But I really don't use any of that stuff, heck, I barely understand 3/4 of it. The real kicker is being able to see where people are visiting, what they are visiting, when they are visiting and what keywords and referrers were used to get them to your site. In case you didn't know, a referrer is when they click a link on another site, and it leads to your site. For instance, if someone does a keyword search in Google and your site pops up, and they click the link to get to your site, then Google is the referrer.

Okay, back to the tutorial. If you already have one or more domains in your profile, you'll want to click on the "Add Website Profile" link found in the upper right hand corner of the "Web Profiles" section of the GA screen you see when you log into GA.

This takes you to another page where you select "Add a Profile for a new domain".

Then enter the URL of the domain, your country or territory and your timezone. Then click "Finish."

Now it gives you the code required for GA to find your site. It is JavaScript and looks someting like this:

<script src="http://www.google-analytics.com/urchin.js" type="text/javascript">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
_uacct = "UA-1027491-8";
urchinTracker();
</script>

If you have a blogspot blog, you can edit the template (this is for the new beta blogs, I don't know about the old stuff because I don't use them...sorry). Add a new HTML/JavaScript element, put the code in that element (in HTML mode, not in RTF or 'Compose' mode), save it and VOILA! the code is now added to your site.

If you host your own site, put the script between the head tags of the default page (or on a module that is displayed on all pages). The domain that I registered here is really just parked, it is forwarded to my family domain, so I put this in the head tag just before I tell the browser to redirect to the other site.

You might see that it says "Tracking Unknown - Check Status" in the right hand column of the the row containing the domain you just added. Click the "Check Status" link. It should tell you the code was found. When you click "Done" again, the grid should show "Waiting for Data" instead of "Tracking Unknown".

I do have one site, My Home Town that does not seem to be found ever. I have added the code several times, but to no avail. I am going to delete it from GA in the next couple of days, and re-add it to see if that helps. It's a blogspot site so it should be found (blogspot is owned by Google).

Who is visiting, and from where?

There is an exceptionally free tool from Google (of course, who else offers so much for so little?). The tool is Google Analytics. You use your Google account (if you dont' have one, you need one - so when your finished reading this, head on over and make yourself one). I wasn't sure what it would be all about when I first set it up, but it has some excellent stats about your blog (or any other website you set it up with).

Now, if you are using a blogging service (i.e. blogger, wordpress, typepad or any of the other umpteen million blog hosting services available), you probably don't have access to the server logs. That is, there is no way for you to see who is visiting your blogs. Which ones are being read the most, where people are coming from, what keywords are used and what search engines are serving readers to your blog. If you host your own blog, you can get all of this information from the log files (but it can be a pain in the rear if you don't have a log aggregator to put it all in readable format).

Enter Google Analytics. It takes a day or so to actually get it up and running because after you put the code in your template, Google has to go out and find it. So, you put a little snippet of code in your blog template, it's a small javascript.

After putting that somewhere in your template, and getting it synched with Google - remember, it may take a day or so to get it actually cranking out data. You can look at all kinds of metrics about your site. For instance, with this blog, I found that while I don't have many visitors, I do have some from India, Venezuela and Japan. How cool is that? Foreign folks, reading little old me. I am still trying to understand all the data in GA and maybe I can find out how these visitors found little old me.

As you can see, the tool is very visual, but the charts, etc can be turned off so all you see is the raw data (I don't know why you'd want to, but there are all kinds out there aren't there?)

I wanted to kind of introduce you to Google Analytics in this post. I am going to put my family domain in the GA tool to see what it looks like. It has a PR of 1 for some reason, I don't know why because nothing links to it that I know if, but then again, it has been active and serving pages since about 1997, so maybe it has that simply based on it's age. Another one I'm going to do is a parked domain of a similar name. It used to be loaned to a bull fighter in spain (who happens to share my last name) so that might be interesting to see what it hitting that domain.

Anyway, over the weekend I'll add those two domains and walk you all through it so you can see what it takes. Not that it's complicated and you couldn't do it on your own if you wanted to.

As always, I sincerely appreciate your visits. Come back soon! -- OH, and a big WELCOME to you folks from Japan, India and Venezuela (tell your friends ok? - ok, thanks)

Tech Tags: google analytics japan india venezuela blog website stats visits hits keywords search engines

Technorati Tools

Technorati link count widget is pretty cool. This little bugger displays (according to technorati) actual real-time links to your blog. This could be a cool feature if you have a popular blog and you want visitors to be envious of the number of links people make to you. However, in my case, the number would be so low it would simply look pathetic.

Technorati uses tags to categorize and sort blog content. Using tags pointed to technorati in your posts will certainly help people find content on your site from the technorati website. However, I don't know how much help that really is since until I started this whole blogging thing, I hadn't heard of technorati at all. And, not to toot my own horn (okay, maybe a little) I started programming in HTML, and my first website had a grey background and black text (that was all that was available to web programmers at the time). The format for adding tags to your post is as follows:

<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/[tagname] rel="tag">[tagname]</a>

There are a couple of places that can auto-generate (to an extent) tags for your post. Looking at these, my favorite tends to be Fintan's Web-based Technorati Tag Generator. There are also a couple of desktop apps that will do this for you as well. But I like Fintan's because it is quick and simple and you don't have to worry about downloading anything and running code from people you don't know.

Most of the tools are fairly self-explanatory. Unless you actually use the technorati site as a portal (which I'm certain they want you to do), I don't see a whole lot of point in them though. All in all, other than being able to see how many, and which, blogs link to your blog, there isn't a whole lot at technorati that really floats my boat.

Technorati information

According to the technorati.com "About Us" section, they are:

Technorati is the recognized authority on what's happening on the World Live Web, right now. The Live Web is the dynamic and always-updating portion of the Web. We search, surface, and organize blogs and the other forms of independent, user-generated content (photos, videos, voting, etc.) increasingly referred to as “citizen media.”

Armed with this information, one who is interested in making any kind of money by blogging, it seems, should setup a technorati account and claim all of their blogs. It is a quick and easy way to view how many (and what) other blogs link to your blogs. This can be useful to see where things are coming from, and probably who else is reading your blogs. Sure, you can get all of this informaiton from your server logs (if you have access to these). I haven't yet found a way here in blogspot to see who visits and from where. There is probably a way to do this, but I'm new to all this blogging stuff, and quite frankly, haven't delved too deeply into this aspect yet.

For instance, in my main blog, Bigsibling, I can view the server logs and see that someone actually connected to it via a nokia phone. That is sooo cool. I only wish I could tell who it was and why they visted my blog on their phone. But I digress.

I'm not 100% certain of technorati's data. For instance, for this here blog here it shows there are "3 links from two blogs" but under that it says "No Links". You can see for yourself here. And then again, just because someone says they are the end-all-and-be-all of blog tracking, does that really make it so? Probably not, but I figure it couldn't hurt because, heh, its free!

The cool thing is, you can put any website in their search bar and see what blogs link to it. I have one that isn't really a site, just pretty much parked, but some garage in Spain has linked to the address, I believe it to be a mistake because it is supposed to link to some city council site for a city in Spain.

At any rate, it's a cool place, there are some tools there that can be used. Those will have to be discussed in greater detail in later posts. I just wanted to get something up since it has been several days since my last post (hey, gimme a break, I been sick....sheesh).

As always, thanks for visiting!