Blogging Tip - Useful Tools

One of the most useful tools when starting out a new blog, is the ability to view and analyze your traffic. Doing so allows you to see how many visits you get each day, how many are unique or returning visitors and what keywords they searched for to find your blog.

By seeing what keywords draws people in, you can monitor that and delete the ones you have listed that nobody ever uses to find you. You can then replace these with more useful keywords based on the ones that do work. For instance if your blog is about gardening and you have the keywords "Gardening, petunias, gardeners tools" you will see that Gardening and Gardeners tools bring in the most traffic to your site. You can then remove "petunias" and replace it with something that fits the other two, like "Garden Flowers" and see how well your new keyword did.

There are some very useful sites that will analyze your traffic for free. The two I find most useful are:

Google Analytics
and
Sitemeeter
I have heard that Mybloglog is also very useful

With Google Analytics, you will be taken through a short setup process and at the end you will be given a tracking code to put somewhere on your site. This is so Google Analytics can verify your site and start tracking it. If you use blogger, you can just paste this into the bottom of your HTML page.

Sitemeeter gives its users a small button to use and a tracking ID to remember. Keep that ID somewhere so you can remember it later. You can then use the blogger HTML/Javascript widget to paste the sitemeeter code into and place the button on your blog.

New Blog - Tennis 'n' Trains

Announcing a new blog, Tennis 'n' Trains. This interesting blog covers a wealth of knowledge on what the author refers to as the interesting "inner" game of tennis. Okay, I added interesting in there myself. But it is! The author also discusses their tennis experiences and includes many other interesting articles. In addition to the great information regarding tennis, the blog also hosts useful information regarding model trains. A highly recommended blog for any hobby or sports enthusiast, Tennis 'n' Trains is definitely a worth while read. I enjoy it, and don't even play tennis! Go check it out today!

Blogging Tips - Finding Content For Your Blog

So you are a new blogger. You are obviously excited about it and raring to go. You have so much to say for yourself and to your readers. Then one fine day you find you've run through everything you had to say. What do you do? How do you generate new content for your blog? Just look up some blogging tips to help you along the way to successful blogging.

1. Look for Inspiration

That doesn't mean you sit around waiting for inspiration to strike you like a bolt of lightning. It means that you get out there and start hunting. Look for a topic you feel strongly about, research it and write about it. Check out any exciting news stories you find from varying media sources. Is there anything interesting from fellow bloggers posts? The choices are many and you will find a lot to learn from blogging tips.

2. Check out the Links

Some bloggers just seem to have a knack for finding interesting links for their readers to check out. It isn't the same as providing original content on your blog. But you can source material that your readers may find interesting and recommend it to them. A few blogging tips can help solve this problem.

3. Stay on Track

Track interesting stories on the net. Maintain your readership figures by following up on stories that have dropped out of sight of the public eye. Provide your readers with regular updates on news stories that interest them that they may not find any where else.

HTML and Blogging

One, is learning HTML important to becoming a better blogger? There really is no straight answer to that. With blogging becoming increasingly popular you can now do many HTML functions directly within your create post window simply by clicking on a few buttons. However, there are still some basic functions not included and yes, knowing these functions can make your blog look better. People enjoy reading better looking blogs, and are more likely to subscribe or come back.

So, here is a short run down of some basic HTML any blogger should know:
*Note I am not an expert at HTML, so this is some general information anyone can use*

What are tags? Tags are words describing what you want to happen and are enclosed by these symbols <>. Those symbols are known as brackets. The tag is generally at the start of a piece of HTML code and tells the code when to start and when to stop, along with what to do. The starting of the code is just the word inside the brackets. When you see the same word inside brackets along with the backslash / that means to end that string of code.

Here are basic tags as an example:
*Important Note* Usually you can put in a code before your HTML that allows the code you wrote to display rather than being used. However, Blogger has something weird going on, so it isn't working right. I will be putting spaces between the brackets <>bold< / b >
- <>strong< / strong > (usually bold)
- <>underlined< / ul >
- <>italics< / i >
- <>emphasis< / em > (usually italics)
- <> strike through < / strike >
-<>This centers text on the page < /center >
- <>teletype text (typewriter text) < / tt >
- <>blockquotes < / blockquotes>(how this looks will depend on your CSS template but it usually indents your paragraph)

HTML is not only used to make things look different, but also to give our browser instructions to perform certain actions. For instance, when we want to post a link to something, without showing the whole URL. Here are some examples:

- Basic Link < href ="”url”">link title< / a > (where ‘url’ is the page you want to link to and ‘link title’ is the word/s that you want the link to say.
- Email Link < href="”">< / a > (where ‘EMAIL’ is the email address you want to be a link).

Another nifty HTML code? Image tags. Image tags allow you to show a name of the image when you mouse-over it, make the image link to another website, or more. Here are some basic HTML codes to use with images you post on your blogs.

- Basic Image tag - < src ="”url”"> (where url = the url of the image you want to show)
- Alt Tags - < src="”url”" alt="”short"> (an alt tag tells the reader what they are missing if the image doesn’t load in their browser.
- Image as a link - < href="”link">< src="”url”">< / a > (where ‘link url’ is the url of the page you want the image to link to and ‘url’ is the image location).

Want to learn more? Webmonkey is an excellent resource to go to.