Well guys – I am still playing at catch up with the homework from week 4. If my fingers were walking instead of typing, I think I would have circumnavigated the world. I have commented on blogs and now I have to complete another 90 comments on the “do follows” list.

What did week 5 hold for all of us? We had to:

• Install Google Analytics
• Find a Niche using Google Adwords Tool
• Research your niche
• Add RSS feeds
• and Backup your WordPress Blog

This was interesting. I had already installed Google Analytics on my site last time I went through the course. Google Analytics is a very good tool that gives lots of good information. Just let me show you some of my statistics.

The period shown is from the 20 July to 20 August. You can see as a result of my commenting on  peoples blogs and these people then coming to my blog to comment has helped  my traffic increase by 95.95% and total number of visitors was 339. The average page visited was 2.38 and the average time on site an amazing 7.31 minutes. There were 58.11% new visitors so that means that just over 41% were returning visitors. The bounce rate was 46.02% so that means people were staying for some time and not just clicking and leaving immediately otherwise the bounce rate would have been much higher.

If you go to “visitors” and click on “map overlay” it shows that these 339 people came from 30 countries around the world. Then click on “traffic sources” and then go down and click on “all traffic sources” – the total number of sources is 95. The total number of visitors that have come to my site since I installed Google Analytics is 1883 and they have come for 175 sources.

There is a lot we can learn from these statistics. You can drill down and know exactly how many people visit your site per day. I really enjoy examining the stats.

So this is Sue McDonald saying I must get back to commenting so I can complete all my tasks at hand because I know we are halfway through the course and Mark will introducing more homework next week.

This is Sue again – just finished another long session with Mark and my fellow students. These weekly sessions keep you motivated and on track. There is so much to learn and again homework this week will definitely take a lot of time. Again this week, we are still learning ways to drive traffic to our site. We all know that we need the traffic to get the list and in the end make some money. This week however, we have to install Google Analytics so we can actually monitor all of our visitors. One important part of signing up is to make sure you put in the time where you are because otherwise the information you get back will not be correct.

I love this tool. I especially love how you can tell where all your visitors come from and even what language they speak. Clever Google! If you are not sure how to do this, go to your dashboard on Google Analytics. Click on “Visitors”and you will get a drop down box and from here you can click on the map overlay and see a visual representation of where your visitors are coming from. You can also click on the Map Overlay in the Visitors Segmentation box also. This box is on the lower right hand side of the first page.

There is so much information that is available to you regarding your visitors. The map will give you a clear indication where your visitors are. You can also ascertain if you are getting a new visitor or a returning visitor. You can find out how many pages the visitor has looked at and what is the time they have spent on your site. You will be shown your bounce rate. This is the Wikipedia definition of “Bounce Rate”. “It essentially represents the percentage of initial visitors to a site who “bounce” away to a different site, rather than continue on to other pages within the same site.”

Traffic Sources provide us with more information on how the traffic arrived at our site whether it is direct traffic or referring sites – whether people arrive because they had click on an ad or used some of our keywords. This is all great information because you can monitor what words are being searched for.

When you have a site always include Google Analytics on it. This will eventually help you monetize your site.

Hope you found this interesting….catch you later


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