Do you know your metrics? What is metrics?

“Metrics is a way to measure certain aspects of your operation so that you have a starting point from which to improve your statistics.”

Some measurement stats you should be aware of is:

1. daily unique visitor count
2. overall hits per month
3. number of backlinks to your blog
4. how large is your email marketing list

These are just some of the basic metrics you should be aware of.

The reason you should keep track of your daily unique visitor count is to make sure you are doing everything you can to constantly attract traffic. Unique visitor traffic is new visitors to your blog who never came to your blog before. The one most important thing you can do to help your unique visitor count is to keep posting on a regular basis. Every time you make a new post to your blog, you are pinging the search engines and attracting them to help get you higher in the rankings. When you go higher in search engine rankings, the more likely you are to attract unique visitors. Getting new visitors is very important because it helps you rank as an “authority” site. That is, a site that carries a lot of weight as a site that contains very high quality information relevant to the search from the search engines.

Overall hits per month counts all visits from unique visitors, repeat visitors and visits from search engines. You want to know this statistic to make sure you are not “static.” The object here is to constantly figure out ways to increase this figure from month to month.

Backlinks are  necessary in order to help rank you site high in the search rank. The number of one way backlinks to your site proves to the search engines that your site is looked upon as the site to see because other sites have “referred” their visitors to your site. Again, this proves your blog site as an authority of your niche.

Email marketing is hot right now.  Having an email list or a subscriber base that is growing is a good sign that your business will grow too. Always figure out ways to grow your list and to monetize it. You want to make money from your subscribers. They are your fans!

It’s just a matter of linking each platform with a plugin or hyper link to the blogs or social media sites you want to connect.

Let’s say you have a Facebook page and you have 300 followers there. Let’s also say you have 120 subscribers in your email list from people opting in to your blog newsletter. You could conceivably make a blog post and hook it up so your Facebook friends and blog newsletter also gets the same blog post content without you having to repeat the post to the other sites. So, you get the leverage of making one blog post and spreading it to your 300 Facebook followers and 120 email subscribers at the same time. Now it gets better. Each of your Facebook friends may have hundreds of friends of their own. So making one blog post actually can reach thousands within a very short amount of time….even hours! People who are copied on the email subscription are able to forward the blog post to still other people and their email lists could be forwarding it to even more people.

Now there is no guarantee that hundreds or thousands will pick up on the blog post unless the post has interest to the reader. There are many other factors of getting your blog post noticed by many people.

So the total connection of blogging to the world becomes more real.

Blogging from mobile devices are another hot trend today. More and more people are blogging from their compact computer tablets and even their smart phones. It is predicted that, with trillions of text messages going on in the world today, the smart phone and portable computer tablets will be the platform of choice for your audience to communicate with. So get used to making your websites and blogs “mobile friendly.”

One last big trend going on with blogging is in the female population. “Mommie” bloggers and blogs with topics of interest to females is on a dramatic rise. So pay attention to that market if you produce a product or service related to females.

48% of all bloggers believe that more and more people will be getting their main source of news and information through blogs.

So if you have a blog already started, keep your focus on the trends, both emerging and current. You will profit sooner than later if you do so.

In this blog post we are going to talk about one untapped method of marketing from your blog that could pay dividends to you many times over. Want to know what it is? Contests!

Contests are one of the most creative things you an offer that can drive people to your place of business. Who doesn’t want to win an Apple iPad, a $50 gift certificate, or a weekend for two in San Diego? People like to play games with a chance to win something while learning about your business at the same time.

Your blog can perform the best platform for starting up your contest. If you want more “punch” with this method, I recommend you also bring in the power of Facebook and Twitter as well. I you could get word out on your blog, Facebook and Twitter all at the same time about your contest, you will score big for turnout and participation in your contest.

Making blog posts to your blog are easy. It is the organizing a plan to get the word out about your contest.

Plan out a 30 day period for your contest to give as many people a chance to participate. Prior to that 30 day period, publicize it for 30 days prior. I have a client who started a Best Buy gift certificate give away for a two month period and increased his walk in traffic to his business over three times. We don’t have statistics at the moment about the kind of sales he made with the additional customer visits but it certainly didn’t hurt his business!

So, with some creative ideas on what contest to have and what to give away as a prize, make it fun and give a strict deadline of when the contest is over. You will find that towards the end of the promotion you will get a swarm of customers by the last day.

If you sell widets, you better have the word “widgets” in your post header often. This not only helps the search engines find your business blog, but it also gets your site higher rankings. The more posts you have about widgets in your content and post header, the more you will have more relevance to all search tools online back to your site.

Secondly, writing fairly short articles are the best. (We will use the term articles and blog posts to mean the same thing.) Writing an article that is around 300 words on the average is going to be best. You want to write articles with first time visitors in mind. If you were to write a blog post that is one thousand words, you may “bore” a visitor and they may leave. Keep your blog post brief and to the point. That will keep the interest of your visitor and the chances of them coming back is greater.

Lastly, getting comments on your blog is really not as important as getting visitors to read your blog. The one most important thing comments on your blog gives you is credibility. If someone who visited your blog took the effort to actually click on the comment button, it is a complement to you that you cared enough to write something that is interesting enough to someone else.

Writing blog posts to attract the search engines are good but you really should look at your visitor count. What matters is the visitor count, first time visitors, or “unique” visitors count is the statistic you should pay most attention to.

You have more than enough information to keep on appealing to solving their problems. Blogging allows feedback from your customers as well. Remember in previous blog posts I stated that you need to carry on a “conversation” with your blog visitors. You make a blog post that is relevant to your visitors, and it sparks interest with them and they comment back to you. Now, just because you may not get many comments from your visitors, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t reading or paying attention to your blog. So many people are coming back to your blog and reading everything and not commenting.

You don’t realize it, but your visitors are paying attention to your blog. You will find out through checking your visitor stats. If you don’t know how to check your stats, ask your webmaster how to get into the hosting account to find these statistics. For those of you who have Google Analytics attached to your blog, you simply log in there and find out these stats.

What is important is you consistently post to your blog. In time, you will have hundreds, if not thousands of regular visitors to your blog and this is where you start monetizing your blog.

In my next blog post, we will cover techniques on how to monetize your blog.

There are over 130 million blogs indexed as of 2002. Over 77% of internet users read blogs. Just these two statistics alone make blogging for your business relevant to anyone going online to read about your industry.

Over 60% of blog readers are between the ages of 18 to 44 years old and 75% of those have college degrees. On top of that, one in four have over a 100 thousand household income. So you have a well educated, young to middle aged population with a very decent income. Would you be interested in attracting this audience to a blog you set up for your business? Of course you would!

Out of the current business related blogs out there, 32% are self employed, and 14% are corporate bloggers. In other words, a little less than half of all blogs are already made by business. These business bloggers utilize at least 5 different ways to generate traffic to their blog site.

56% of current business bloggers state that their blog has helped position their company as an expert in their industry. Remember, by the very nature of consistent blogging, you become the expert. How much does that mean to your business?

I can’t stress enough that, if you don’t have a blog set up for your business yet, you are miles behind your competition at the monent. No need to panic though, because there is still time to get a blog online and start posting as soon as tomorrow!

In my next post, I cover how you can research your competing blogs and make yours better.

Now think about what this means, millions of people and/or companies are posting content on their blog and it is making a difference. Whether a person or entity wants to push their “brand” or state an opinion, or sell a product or service, they get “it.” The blog is getting attention and getting read.

With thousands more people coming online in the near future, there is no better way to get exposure for your business, whether local or world wide!