I went through a lot since starting blogging. The emotional stress during the initial period is understandable. You cannot help yourself but to wonder if it’s all worth it when you see you visitors count suddenly decrease to 12, and your 6 subscribers that you excitedly told your wife about a day earlier, just plummeted to one.

But then there is the physical domain as well. There were days I thought there was no way I was going to find a subject to write about. My routine was all over the place, I spent my entire free time blog hopping, checking my stats every 5 minutes to see what has changed, and when I finally got myself to write anything it usually took me 3 hours because of all the distractions.

Today I am going to share the three tools that increased my productivity during the last couple of weeks.

Recording Ideas As They Come

This is the best thing that ever happened to me. I noticed that during the day I would come up with numerous ideas for articles, but if left unattended those ideas got forgotten rather quickly. I started to use a notepad to write down the ideas as soon as I had something on my mind. When using my computer I use a sticky-note widget to stick those wonderful yellow notes on my desktop. That way, by the end of the day, I go through my notebook to choose that day’s subject, and with the sticky notes I am always reminded of everything when I glance on my screen.

I’m trying to get used to Google Notebook, with little success. Nevertheless, I will continue trying as people report it is a very cool tool for keeping track of things.

Dark Room

I mentioned earlier that I got distracted a lot when finally settling down to write an article. This is due to constant flow of information that you just have to check out, leaving everything for later.

Lately, I found a cool little program that lets you write without distractions. It opens in full screen, blocking everything out, except the simple green-colored Courier font.

I find it great. Finally, when I write I am able to finish the whole first draft of the article before going to do some further research or whatever. Just for comparison, when using Word I was writing one, sometimes two paragraphs before deciding to give myself a mental brake and check my stats or stumble some sites.

So I highly recommend this tool. You can download here: they.misled.us/dark-room. Note that you will have to install the .NET Framework if you don’t have it already. You will have a download link for this on their site as well.

Google Analytics and Google Benchmarking

Being the stats addict that I am, Google Analytics is the tool that I spend many hours using. It takes a while to realize what exactly you want to look for when using it, but once you do have a plan you’re on the right track. It takes 5 minutes to get the current picture and know that certain things have to be improved.

The parameters that are important to me are the referring sites, top content and keywords. I note the bounce rate and the time on site for each of the above. I also briefly go through the visitor trending and visitor loyalty menus. The Site Overlay in the Content menu is cool, it will show you how many times links were clicked on your site.

A relatively new development is Google Benchmarking. It is a tool that compares the stats of your site to the average in the industry. The number of sites participating is steadily growing and the data is becoming more and more accurate. That adds another important tool to help you know what are your strong point and where you are limping behind. Very recommended.

As my quest continues, I am sure that those 3 things are not the last. I’m constantly learning new techniques and discovering new tools, and be sure that once I find anything really useful you will know about it.

- Alex

Technorati Tags: productivity, dark room, google analytics, google benchmarking, google notebook, stats addict, visitors, subscribers

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

The 3 Things That Increased My Productivity

Everyone hates having a high percentage of those annoying hit-n-run visits. You invested your soul in your blog, picking and tweaking with your theme, gathering all the popular plugins to make everything ready, writing those first dozen of articles to get things going, but, behold! You check your site stats and you go, “Hey, this can’t be right?!”, 60 visitors stayed for 5 seconds and went bye bye…

What did you do wrong? Probably a mix of things, but that doesn’t matter. Those 60 visitors will not come back in the near future anyway.

What you can do is to plan ahead, and make those hit-n-runners stay long enough to get interested, and maybe even subscribe to your RSS.

1st Kind – Referrer Specific Bad Traffic

Use your stats to identify the source of the “bad” traffic. Look for traffic sources and analyze each traffic source separately. This way you would be able to see if it is a certain referrer that is sending you that “bad” traffic. (e.g. Entrecard Chain Droppers). Depending on the outcome of your analysis, you may be in luck. Knowing that it is one or two referrers that are sending you those bad guys, there are a few tricks to grab their attention:

• Example 1:

  Welcome, StumbleUpon visitor! Please consider giving this article thumbs up if you find it useful or interesting

• Example 2:

  If you came here through Entrecard, receive a free *whatever* for subscribing to Net-Entrepreneur.com via email

*whatever* can be short review, a blogroll link (for a month), 125×125 ad (for a month), etc.

2nd Kind – General Bad Traffic

If your problem is not referrer specific, and assuming your content is readable, I have the following suggestions:

• If your articles are long or you want the reader to click to view your article (i.e. advertising concerns), use the more tag instead of the_excerpt tag. It is way more flexible and friendly (Find more on WordPress)

• Link your articles to your previous, related, articles.

• Use one of the available Popular Posts and Related Posts plugins.

• Use the above the fold space of your blog to grab readers’ attention:

  • Create a custom header for your blog, if you still have the standard one that came with your theme

  • Incorporate pictures and graphics into your articles

• Use your available ad space to advertise yourself:

  • Offer giveaways to new subscribers

  • Offer weekly/monthly giveaways to randomly chosen commentators (could be ebooks, reviews, ads, links, etc.), use a banner with a pitch like “this week’s winner commentator is..”, “this week’s prize is…”

Good luck people!

- Alex

Technorati Tags: bad, traffic, fight, plugins, visitors, stumbleupon, entrecard, referrer

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

The 2 Kinds of Bad Traffic and Ways to Fight It

There were a few reasons I didn’t sign-up before, but the main one being that people were saying Entrecard traffic is a widget-searching, drop-and-run, don’t-care-about-who-you-are, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, 10-second-visits, kind of traffic.

After a day of being a member I have no choice but confirm this statement.

I’m using Google Analytics for my site tracking, which is a great free toolbox of ….emmm…. tools (yea, I know, but it’s 1am already). So, I chose Jan 24th as the timeframe, and sorted the data by traffic sources => referring sites => entrecard.com

We are looking at two parameters:

Bounce Rate – Bounce Rate is the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page) (Google).
My Bounce Rate for Entrecard.com visitors is 89.66%. This means that practically 90% of Entrecard visitors left my site without clicking on any article, category, static page – anything.

What makes this even more interesting is the next parameter:

Avg. Time on Site – Avg. Time on Site is the average duration of a visit to your site. (Google)
My Avg. Time on Site for entrecard.com visitors is 00:00:05.

Should I say more?

- Alex

Disclaimer: This article is based on 12 hours of being a member. I will track the statistics and make sure to update this article, if needed.

Technorati Tags: truth, entrecard, traffic, visitors, bounce, site, rate

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

The Truth About Entrecard Traffic Revealed

I have a laughable amount of unique visitors, same with RSS subscribers. It’s been 15 days since launch and I haven’t made one cent. The Little Alex on my left shoulder (the one with the hooves and horns) laughs and says “I told you so”. I hate being told that. It is time to quit prettying up the blog and get into some serious promotion. 0 Traffic = 0 Money.

 I made the following steps to promote my blog:

1. Signed up for Google Webmaster Tools, and configured it to do its magic

2. Submitted my blog to BlogEngage.com (about a week ago), and started to submit posts

3. Submitted my blog to Technorati.com (a couple of days ago)

4. Submitted my blog to BlogCatalog.com (today, still pending approval – notice the cool widget in the sidebar)

5. Participated (and still am) in discussions, commenting (meaningful) comments on related blogs

WHOOPS, it is late, and M (the wife) is threatening to halt her services if I don’t shut down my “mistress” immediately. So, fearing the worst, I will have to bring you up to date next time.

- Alex

Technorati Tags: business, routine, publishing, unique, visitors, traffic, money, promote

Happily posting useful content at Net-Entrepreneur.com
Current post was originally posted on:

Why Does My Business Suck?