Blogging

How to Start a Blog

How to Create a Blog?
The best way to start a blog is to choose one of the several weblog platforms (websites), which facilitate blogging on the world wide web. Some of the most popular blogging platforms include Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal, TypePad and Bravenet. Most of these platforms provide the service for free, while others charge a stipulated fee. Once you have chosen the platform, you will have to go to the website and sign up for the service. While services like the Blogger allow you to use your Google account to start your own blog, others such as the WordPress and Bravenet require you to sign up on the host site. The sign up process will require you to fill up some simple verification details about yourself, and on completion of this process you will get the URL for your blog. As a next step you will be directed to the customization process, wherein you will get to choose the layout of your blog. There would be a wide variety of templates and colors to choose from, using which you can give your blog the look you want. Once you are done with the customization part, you can go to the settings panel and start blogging. You will be given the step by step directions on how to blog throughout the process. You can even watch the preview of your post, and make the necessary changes before your publish your post. Going through the blogging tips for beginners will help you to get into further details of this activity.

How to Make Money through a Blog?
That brings us to one of the most sought after topic in blogging – blog monetization. This is much more easier when you host your blog yourself, but to do that you need to be well versed with the technical aspects of web hosting. You will have to choose a particular niche for your blog in order to get advertisers to advertise their products and services on it. For instance, if you blog about technology and gadgets, there would be a hordes of advertisers out there who would be willing to advertise their products on your blog. If you are purely into blogging to make money, it is wiser to choose a niche which can attract a decent amount of visitors. Technology, real estate, music, car rentals and other such commercial topics are some popular niches to choose from. Other than adding quality content on a regular basis, you also need to know how to promote your blog to pull in more traffic. This will help your blog rank in the search engines like the Google search engine. Better ranking and a decent number of visitors will help you in getting the best possible deals as far as ads are concerned. If you host your blog yourself, you can optimize and manage your blog on your own. If you avail the free blogging services, on the other hand, you will have to avail the services of ad serving applications, such as Google AdSense, to generate text, image and video ads for you blog.

Some Steps for Bloggers

How to Install Google Analytics on Blogger

Wouldn’t it be nice to know how many people actually visited your

blog each day? How about knowing which of your posts are the

most popular? Well surprisingly Blogger doesn’t currently offer

any native blog analytics but fortunately there is Google Analytics —

available for free.

Google Analytics is a great tool that will show you all sorts of useful

information about how people found your blog, keywords they searched

on to find you, where they came from and even how long they stayed.

You’ll learn more about where your visitors come from and how they

interact with your blog. This is a must tool if you are trying to build

a profitable blog otherwise you are flying blind!

This article will show you how to add Google Analytics to your

Blogger blog. It’s a fairly simple process and doesn’t require

any technical skill at all.

Step #1 – Setup a Google Analytics Account

Go to Google Analytics and sign in using your Blogger login.

If your account doesn’t work for some reason, you can create

a new one instead.

Once you login you’ll see a screen that looks like this:

Click on the “Sign Up >>” button and proceed to the next step which

will ask you for your general information. Website URL, Account Name,

Country, and Time Zone. The screen will look like this:

If you noticed, I just put my Blogger url (without the http://) and called it

“David’s Account” because this is your top-level container for 1 or 100

different websites so it’s a good idea to name it something more general.

The next step will ask you for your contact information which includes your

first name, last name, phone number, and country. Easy so far right?

Your last step in signing up will ask you to accept the user agreement

terms and conditions which you should read (just kidding…who

actually ever reads these entire legal terms anyhow?).

Now this next screen is very important. This is the code you will need to

copy and paste into your blogger template. Go ahead and click into the

box and it will automatically highlight the entire block of code for you.

Now you need to copy that code and paste it into notepad or into a

MS Word document. Save it as you’ll need to use it later.

After you click on the “continue >>” button you will be taken to

your brand new Google Analytics dashboard! You will see your

blogger blog listed but with no analytical data….yet.

Ok, now you are done with setting up your Google Analytics account.

The next step is placing the tracking code into your Blogger template so

it can report back to Google Analytics and provide you with some cool

data points.

Step #2 – Adding GA Tracking Code to Your

Blogger Template

This is not a very difficult step even if you are afraid to touch your template

code. Login to your Blogger account and then click on the “Layout” =>

“Edit HTML” tabs. This will bring you to the template code. Before you

make any changes, I advice you to back up your template just in case

there are any problems. After you’ve done so, continue reading.

Now in the edit template html code window, scroll all the way to the

bottom of your template code and look for the tag. There should

only be one of these closing tags in your template. If you can’t find it

then your template wasn’t properly created and you should add one right

above the tag.The tag should always be your last

line of code in your template. It signifies the end of your template.

Ok, now go back to the code you saved before in a Word Doc from

Google Analytics. You are going to copy it and paste it right above the

tag as illustrated in the image below. The yellow highlighted

code is the new GA code I just pasted into my template.

Save your template and you shouldn’t get any error messages.

If you do, it’s most likely not related to this GA code and something

else with your template itself. Assuming you’ve been successful

with your save, you are all done embedding the GA code in

your template!

Step #3 – Confirm Google Analytics is Tracking

Go back into your Google Analytics account and look at your dashboard.

Most likely you will see a little yellow exclamation mark under the

“status” column that looks like this: . This means everything isn’t

working properly yet which is fine because we are about to tell GA

we just added the code. From your dashboard, click on the “edit”

link which is located to the far right.

After you click on that link, you’ll see another screen like below.

It will say “Tracking Not Installed” followed by a link “Check Status”.

You’ll want to go ahead and click on that link which will tell GA to

visit your site and look for the new code you just pasted in

your template.

Assuming you pasted the code in there as instructed above,

GA will find the new code and begin tracking everything on your blog.

If you are still having problems, it’s most likely something to do with

GA and you should read their help guide to troubleshoot your problem.

The message seen here, “Waiting for Data” means you have correctly

setup GA and data is being gathered! Click on the top left Google Analytics

logo and it will take you back to your dashboard. From there click on the

“View report” link and that’s where all your very important Blogger visitor

data will start appearing!

Now it usually takes an hour or so before you will see any data

(maybe longer if you don’t get much traffic to your blog) so please be

patient. Trust me, you’ll be logging in at least once a day just to see

how much traffic your blog is getting. It’s very addicting and powerful

information to learn from. You’ll be surprised which posts are your

most popular and what countries people are coming from to read

your blog.

Google Analytics is very powerful and we have just learned how to install it

into your Blogger template. We haven’t even scratched the surface on

the features and reporting it can do. For most Bloggers, this will be

enough. Data will be collected and you will just review it. Others with

more in-depth goals (like selling products or services, creating a sales

funnel, etc) will want to spend more time learning GA. Hope you enjoyed

the tutorial and don’t blame me for your new found addiction!

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