If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

I once wondered where my traffic was coming from, I used awstats and it showed a little bit of detail as to where the hits were coming from but it never provided hard cold facts and stats that I needed to sell my advertisements better.

Today we are going to look at 2 programs that allow you to do this for free, I will then discuss why I like one more over the other. Warning though, if your a google hater this post may not be for you, generally I am not to fond of google but in this instance I have to recommended them.

The Long Story - Over the years I wanted to know where my traffic came from, I also wanted to know how people were reaching my site whether that be by a search engine or a referring website. These stats and valuable to not only myself to know where to advertise but also to my advertisers so they know where and how people are going to reach there ads.

While it may seem a bit primitive or perhaps I am just numb to all the programs out there I never thought I would see the stats the way I wanted to. I wanted a simple system with a complex breakdown of all my stats and how people were getting to my website.

After months of searching and trying out programs I finally found two that did basically exactly what I want. Let me first start with the one I don’t care for as much but if you are a google hater this is a good choice.

Site Meter- SiteMeter is a free service (unless you want more advanced stats) that allows you to see where your traffic comes from. It breaks it down into several sections like referrals and such. While SiteMeter is good I found it to be a little unorganized for my needs. That aside the stats it gives you are great and the SiteMeter system does email you either daily, weekly, monthly etc…

You can choose how often the system emails you and it works quite well. Since this is not a review of site meter I won’t get into to much detail as to how the system works. In fact I am not even going to provide screenshots of the sitemeter system because I simply cannot recommended it over Google Analytics which is actually the next system I want to talk about.

Google Analytics- That’s right all you Google haters, the big G is finally doing something that I actually like! The free analytics service they provide is simply great, it displays stats such as referral urls and it tells you what terms and variations of terms that were typed in to reach your website.

Here is a pic of the main google analytics screen, as you can see everything is well laid out in a professional manner. This is why in my book google has opened up a small part of my heart just for them. Its hard to be a google hater when they provide these stats for free!

Not only is the GA system very well organized it also offers everything you need with multiple ways to get to each section of your stats. For instances if you click the Traffic Sources button in the top left it will take you to page where you can then select search terms to see which terms were typed in to get you traffic (actual people typed these in).

Final Thoughts- So now that you have seen the GA system and heard me hype all about it its time for you to test it out and see what you think. One thing I will give to the sitemeter system over GA is that sitemeter shows stats from every search engine not just google. However since google is the biggest search engine right now you can pretty much predict that if you get good stats according to google you get good stats everywhere.

What do you think of the GA system? Do you use it or have you used it in the past? What changes would you like to see google make to the system for ultimate stat displays?

That’s right, its another contest I have decided to enter, I saw the news about it on Tyler Cruz’s blog and decided to enter. This contest looked so good I couldn’t resist entering, mainly for the fact that the publicity the winner of this contest is going to get is insurmountable and will really help me with some testing I am doing in regards to the contests for future posts.

Basically what they want for a blog entry is for me to display the contest badge in this post and then say a few words about how I got started. I have already pretty much covered that on my about page before however I will cover a bit more here since this is what they asked for.

Before I do though be sure and enter the contest yourself if you think you have a shot, whoever wins will be a great resource to the industry and that’s what I am all about so be sure and click my badge to see the contest guidelines. Here are the basic rules for all of you to read if you don’t want to click out of my blog just yet!

Chitika has partnered with TiECON East to launch an exciting contest for bloggers, The Blogpreneur Contest.

We are hosting this contest to feature the success of bloggers.
To keep a successful blog today is by no means an easy challenge, and in this contest you will get a chance to share the secrets to your very own success in how you were able to get your blog up and running and what you think entrepreneurs can learn from you.

For 3 Winners:

• You will be featured as “blog stars” in a promotional spotlight during the TiECON Entrpreneur Forum (attended by over 5,000 people)
• Online video footage of your winning feature from the TiECON Conference to showcase on your blog
• Extreme visibility for your blog on the TiE Boston website via news story, The Chitika Blog & Newsletter
• A winning award badge for your blog & a plaque (awarded at TiECON East 2008; if the winner cannot attend, the plaque will be mailed to you)
• A year-long subscription from our friends at Technology Review Magazine

To Enter the Contest:

• Publish a blog post on your blog highlighting the key factors of your success in free form (no particular structure)
• Include the contest badge (see below) within your post so we can recognize your post an an entry
• Email your blog post link to: Blogpreneur(at)chitika.com so we can make sure your post is counted
• THE CONTEST STARTS APRIL 24th, 2008 and ends May 8th, 2008.
• Three winners will be chosen by a panel of experts from TiECON and Chitika, May 25th and featured May 29th at the close of the Entrepreneur Forum at TiECON East 2008

About TiECON Conference 2008
TiECON East is TiE Boston’s largest annual flagship conference held on both coasts as well as in India. The conference (at different locations) attracts a total of 5000 people each year.

“The newest secret in success is the use of networks- social or business.” And that is why the theme for TiECON East 2008 is ‘Harnessing the Network: Communication, Collaboration, and Convergence: The 3 new Cs in Success.’

About TiE Boston
TiE-Boston is a not-for-profit organization with a mission to foster and support entrepreneurship, either in a start-up context or within a larger company. The organization represents a diverse set of industries, including software and information technologies, biotech, financial services and other services.

About Chitika
Chitika (www.chitika.com) is a full-service online advertising network specializing in the blogosphere and social networks. Today, it engages buyers, brands and bloggers by serving interactive, user-controllable ads directly within relevant posts. Recently, Chitika expanded micro advertising into social networks by enabling independent Facebook application developers to earn revenue as ad-supported micropublishers. For all publishers, Chitika is an easy-to-use platform for earning daily ad revenue. For advertisers and media buyers, Chitika is a proven channel for targeting online consumers and qualified buyers – as they are actively considering a purchase – and engaging them in relevant, brand-specific or product-specific conversations. Founded in 2003, Chitika now serves more than one billion ads per month and counting.

My Entry - I started my humble little blog out on January 3rd 2008 with my opening post, I created this blog after seeing how many people wanted to really learn how to make money online. So many of the so called “Gurus” of the MMO niche had nice blogs with decent info but they fail to give real life examples and actually show you step by step how to make money.

I thought it would be a perfect way to uncover some new thoughts and ideas about MMO and boy was I right. I started with a 6 month goal of achieving no less then 100 subscribers by the 6 month mark, I tend to think people don’t join a blog unless they see real dedication for some time being put into it. To me surprise however I reached that this last month and am now trying for 500 by the end of this year.

Since the blog was created I have done well over 150 posts and continue to provide tips and videos to all the questions I receive. I love to help and teach others and this is just another way of doing that for me.

Another flip to my blog over others is the fact that I have no rules or regulations about what I post, one day it may be about MMO, the next about SEO or Link Building and then the next day I may even show how to improve your blogging skills. I want my blog to be an open venue and to do that it cannot be limited in any way. I have some big plans for InfectedByBugs.com so everyone should subscribe even if you don’t want to!

Lately I have seen a lot more bloggers starting to introduce video into there normal blogs as I have done on InfectedByBugs.com. I don’t know if they saw my site and that I do videos and they wanted to get on board but whatever happened video is getting bigger and fast for normal blog owners.

Today I want to outline a few reasons why you should start video blogging with your already established or brand new blog that you have cooking in the pot. Video blogging can and is fun, easy to do and above all else a great way to get more traffic / readers to your static text blog.

More Traffic - Lets face it, when we video blog we are able to reach a audience that we are unable to reach without video. YouTube, Meta Cafe and other video sites are made for video not static text. In order to get this crowd (which is very large) to your blog you need to create videos that spark interest and in turn send traffic / visitors your way.

There are multiple ways of doing this but the basic one is to create a viral video that gets lots of views. Just sit down and think of the most stupid idea you can, film it and before you know it people will be viewing the video. Just be sure and include your website blog URL in the description box of the video so people have the chance to visit you asap after watching the video.

Explain Things Better - One reason I can see other bloggers getting involved more with video is the fact that they have probably discovered it can be a lot easier to explain things via live video. Your movements and personality come out in a video and that is what our blogging is all about. The more people that get involved with video will start to limit who is the most popular so do something out of the ordinary for extra attention on any video.

More Interaction - Video blogging provides us with another method of interacting with our visitors. They can post comments or video responses of their own to any video you create (if you allow them to). This way you get to know your readers for who they are as well as them you. Connections is what its all about in this game of blogging so do the smart thing and connect with each person you can.

By following these few simple vlogging practices we can create excellent videos that our visitors can interact with us about. The more we get people talking the better chance we have of striking big traffic through videos / vlogging.

That’s right everyone this is the official 150th post on InfectedByBugs.com! The blog has really been pumping since I started it back a few months ago and one of my goals was to post at least 1 post per day, after reaching this 150 post mark that has finally come to pass!

What about you, how many posts do you have on your blog? How long have you been blogging to achieve your posts count!

You may remember my post about the 125 x 125 banner exchange program I joined a few days ago. This is a follow up post to that as I have some results to share with how the program has worked for me thus far (about 5 days into it).

First off I want to thank the 125 x 125 exchange program, upon showing them the post I created about their program they gave me a couple thousand extra impressions for my ad to be displayed around the blogosphere in niche blogs pertaining to me.

Before I get into to much detail I want to first show you the ad I used to obtain the following results. The results I got were not that bad, not GREAT but decent considering I just uploaded one ad when I could have put up 3 different ones to test the waters early!

As you can see the ad is colorful and relays a decent message about my blog and what I do. With this one banner I received over 10,734 impressions and got 37 clicks out of the deal. You may be saying to yourself whoa that’s a lot of impressions but not that high of a CTR what went wrong? Nothing went wrong, while I may have only gotten 37 clicks that was at a CTR % of 0.37!

Most advertisers are fine with those types of numbers and I am as well. All 37 clicks were from relative websites to mine, how can I complain about that? Besides when I purchased a review on JohnChow for my BzImage webmaster forum it cost around $500.00 and I only got maybe 300 visits out of the deal. That’s still a low CTR considering the price tag, advertisers understand that you will not be able to deliver a 100% CTR rate its simply not possible so don’t waste a second thought on it.

One thing this program has done is spark my interest to create several different ads and upload them to the program. Then I can watch and see which ad is clicked on the most giving me real life stats to find out which ad type works the best. This will show me what banner ad draws the attention best, if for nothing else (although I still love and recommendthe whole program) it will allow me to easily discover what ad delivers the best CTR rate.

For that factor alone its worth signing up to the program and doing it right away. I believe that us early members will get some goodies along the way for being the early birds, stay tuned to my blog as I will be doing more posts about this program and the ads I create for better CTR %!