Advice Me

Understanding Blog Terms and Traffic Statistics

Using a blog statistic tracking tool, you can learn who is visiting your blog, what pages and posts they're looking at and how long they're staying on your blog. By analyzing your blog stats, you can determine where your promotion efforts are working, so you know where to increase your efforts and where to decrease your efforts. However, before you can make sense of your blog stats, you have to understand the terminology used by blog stat trackers.

Visits

The number of visits displayed in your blog stats shows the number of times anyone entered your blog during a given time period. Each entry is counted once.

Visitors

Visitors are harder to track than visits because unless users have to register to enter your blog, it is nearly impossible to not double-count repeat visitors. Even if a stat tracker uses cookies to determine whether or not a person who comes to your blog has been there before, it's highly possible that the person may have deleted their cookies since their last visit to your blog. That means the stat tracker would think the person is a new visitor and will count him or her again. With that in mind, visits are a more acceptable measurement tool for bloggers to determine the popularity of their blogs.

Hits

A hit is counted every time a file downloads from your blog. That means each time a page is accessed on your blog, every file that has to download on that page counts as a hit. For example, if a page on your blog includes your logo, an ad, and an image in your blog post, then you'll get four hits from that page — one for the page itself, one for the logo, one for the image, and one for the ad because each file has to download to the user's browser. With this in mind, hits are not used to determine the popularity of your blog since they are always much higher than actual traffic.

Page Views

Page views are the standard measurement of blog popularity and traffic in the blogosphere because that's the statistic online advertisers look at. Each visitor on your blog will view a certain number of pages during their visit. They might see one page then leave, or they might click on link after link viewing a variety of posts, pages and more. Each of the pages or posts that the visitor sees is considered a page view. Advertisers want to know how many page views a blog gets because each page view creates another opportunity for a consumer to see (and possibly click on) the advertiser's ads.

Referrers

Referrers are the other websites (and specific pages) online that are sending visitors to your blog. Referrers could be search engines, other sites that have linked to yours, other blogrolls, blog directories, links in comments, social bookmarks, links in forum discussions and more. Each link to your blog creates an entry point. By reviewing the referrers in your blog stats, you can find out which websites or blogs are sending the most traffic to your blog and focus your promotion efforts accordingly.

Keywords and Keyword Phrases

By reviewing the list of keywords and keyword phrases in your blog stats, you can learn what keywords people are typing into search engines that allow them to find your blog. You can focus on those keywords in future posts and advertising and promotional campaigns to further boost traffic to your blog.

Bounce Rate

The bounce rate shows you what percentage of visitors are leaving your blog immediately after arriving at it. These are people who do not feel your blog is providing the content they're looking for. It's good to monitor where your bounce rate is particularly high and modify your marketing efforts around sites that are sending traffic that doesn't stay on your blog for more than a few seconds. Your goal is to create meaningful traffic and loyal readers, so adjust your marketing planaccordingly to focus on efforts that drive traffic with a lower bounce rate.

Anatomy of an RSS File

RSS or Really Simple Syndication is a very easy XML language to learn because there are only a few tags that are required. And what's really great about RSS is that once you've got a feed up and running, it can be used all over the place. Most Web browsers can read RSS, as well as readers like Google Reader and Bloglines. RSS is a powerful tool for any Web developers who want to increase the visibility of their Web sites.

Tools Required to Write RSS

A text editor: You can use almost any editor that will generate plain ASCII text. I prefer to use jEdit because it's free and it checks the XML for me as I write. But you can also use HTML editors like Dreamweaver or BBEdit.
An RSS validator: If you use an XML editor like jEdit, an RSS validator isn't absolutely required. But I find that errors creep in even in the best editors, so validating the feed is always a good idea.

A Simple RSS Document

This RSS 2.0 document has one item in the feed along with the feed information. This is the minimum you need to have a valid and usable RSS feed.

 A Sample RSS 2.0 Feedhttp://webdesign.lifewire.com/rss2.0feed/

 An example of a simple RSS feed. This is the description of the feed itself, not an item.

 This is the most recent entry in my sample feedhttp://webdesign.lifewire.com/rss2.0feed/entry.html

 This is the text that will appear in the feedreaders. It describes the post itself, not the entire feed.

 http://webdesign.lifewire.com/rss2.0feed/entry.html

As you can see, a basic RSS document has very little required to create a fully functional feed. If you were to paste that code into an RSS validator, it would validate – which means that RSS feed readers could read it too.

The first three lines tell the user agent that this is an XML document, it's an RSS 2.0 file, and there is a channel:

The version information isn't required, but I find that it's a good idea to include that attribute on the tag.

Every feed should have a title, URL, and description. And that's what the

, and tags that live within the channel (but not within an ) define. For most feeds, these elements will never change once you've decided on your feed name and description.

A Sample RSS 2.0 Feed

http://webdesign.lifewire.com/rss2.0feed/ An example of a simple RSS feed. This is the description of the feed itself, not an item.

The last part of the feed are the items themselves. These are the stories that will be syndicated by your feed. Each item is enclosed in an element.

Inside the item you find the same three tags we already know:

, and . They perform the same function as they do outside the item tag, but inside they reference just that one item. So the text inside the is what displays in the feed reader, the title is the title of the post, and the link is where the post links to.

This is the most recent entry in my sample feed

http://webdesign.lifewire.com/rss2.0feed/entry.html This is the text that will appear in the feedreaders. It describes the post itself, not the entire feed.

The only new tag is the tag. This element tells the user agent or feed reader what the unique URL is for that post. This can be the same URL as the link or a separate permanent link (permalink) for the item.

http://webdesign.lifewire.com/rss2.0feed/entry.html

The only thing remaining is to close the item, the channel, and the rss. Because this is XML, all tags need to be closed.

Add New Items to the Top

Most RSS feeds consist of more than one item at a time. This way, if a customer is new to your site, they can see the last few posts, or all of them, if you keep them all in the RSS. To add a new post, just add a new item above the first post:

...

 A second posthttp://webdesign.lifewire.com/rss2.0feed/entry2.html

 Now my feed has 2 posts

 http://webdesign.lifewire.com/rss2.0feed/entry2.html

...

Additional Elements to Dress Up Your RSS Feed

The above RSS is all you need to create a feed, but there are a lot of optional tags that can help improve your feed and provide additional information to your readers. The following are some of my favorite optional tags that you can use to improve your RSS Feeds:

use this tag to tell the reader what language your feed is in. You can use standard language codes, or the language-country designation with country codes added on (like en-us for U.S. English).
- the copyright notice for your channel.
- the email address of the person responsible for the feed's content.
- an image of your feed's logo. This tag includes the sub-tags: ,,, , and .

Note, that the image

must match the channel

and the image dimensions cannot be larger than 144 pixels wide and 400 pixels tall.

All of the above tags go in the and describe the feed, rather than individual items, like this:

...

 A Sample RSS 2.0 Feedhttp://webdesign.lifewire.com/rss2.0feed/

 An example of a simple RSS feed. This is the description of the feed itself, not an item.

 en-us

 Copyright 2007, Jennifer Kyrnin

 webdesign@aboutguide.com (Jennifer Kyrnin)

 Lifewire.com

 http://0.tqn.com/f/lg/s11.gifhttp://webdesign.lifewire.com/rss2.0feed/

...

How to Make a Podcast Feed From Blogger and Google Drive

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Create a Blogger Account

To get started, create a Blogger account. Create an account and create a blog in Blogger. It does not matter what you choose as your username or which template you choose, but remember your blog's address. You will need it later.

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Adjust the Settings

Go to Other settings Screenshot — Enable enclosure links.

Once you've registered for your new blog, you need to change the settings to enable title enclosures.

Go to Settings >Other > Enable Title Links and Enclosure Links.
Set this to Yes.

If you are only creating video files, you do not have to go through these steps. Blogger will automatically create the enclosures for you.

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Put Your .MP3 in Google Drive

Now you could host your audio files in many places. You just need enough bandwidth and a publicly accessible link.

For this example, let's take advantage of another Google service and put them in Google Drive.

Create a folder in Google Drive (just so you can organize your files later).
Set the privacy in your Google Drive folder to "anyone with the link." This sets it for every file you upload in the future.
Upload your .MP3 file into your new folder.
Right-click on your newly uploaded .MP3 file.
Select Get link
Copy and paste this link to a Blogger post.

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Make a Post

Click on the Posting tab again to return to your blog post. You should now have both a title and a link field.

Fill out the Title: field with the title of your podcast.
Add a description in the body of your post, along with a link to your audio file for anyone who isn't subscribing to your feed.
Fill out the Link: field with the exact URL of your .MP3 file.
Fill out the MIME type. For a .MP3 file, it should be audio/mpeg3
Publish the post.

You can validate your feed right now by going to Castvalidator. But just for good measure, you can add the feed to Feedburner.

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Go to Feedburner

Go to Feedburner.com, and on the home page, type in your blog's URL (not the URL of your podcast.) Check the check-box that says I am a podcaster, and then click Next.

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Give Your Feed a Name

Enter a feed title, which does not need to be the same name as your blog, but it can be. If you do not already have a Feedburner account, you will need to register for one at this time (registration is free).

When you've filled out all the required information, specify a feed name, and press Activate Feed.

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Identify Your Feed Source on Feedburner

Blogger generates two different types of syndicated feeds. Theoretically, you could choose either one, but Feedburner seems to do a better job with Blogger's Atom feeds, so choose the radio button next to Atom.

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Optional Information

The next two screens are totally optional. You can add iTunes-specific information to your podcast and choose options for tracking users. You don't need to do anything with either of these screens right now if you don't know how to fill them out. You can press Next and go back to change your settings later.

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Burn, Baby, Burn

After filling out all the required information, Feedburner will take you to your feed's page. Bookmark this page (t is how you and your fans can subscribe to your podcast). In addition to the Subscribe with iTunes button, Feedburner can be used to subscribe with most "podcatching" software.

If you have correctly linked to your podcast files, you can also play them directly from here.