Iichii yaa yaa readers!!!! In this installment I will talk about how to understand your web statistics to increase revenue to your blog. In my safari hunt in the internet jungle, I came upon a word I’ve seen many times but didn’t understand what it meant. That word is Webtrends. I found out it is an advanced log analyzer. A more precise definition is:

WebTrends is specifically designed for mid-sized organizations featuring revolutionary visualization capabilities that transform historically complex reports into easy-to-interpret analysis and new Dashboard and Excel integration technologies that seamlessly build web analytics into your daily workflow. From the most granular examination of campaigns and merchandising performance, to the most complete navigation, conversion and search engine marketing analysis, WebTrends provides mid-sized companies comprehensive insight for easier decisions, smarter marketing and optimum results.

Now you don’t have to run out and purchase this expensive software for your blog, but some tips I’ve seen on how to use the data it provides will enable you readers out there to understand your own web analytical software no matter how minimal the features. The good thing is, you can use Google’s free Web Analytics to play with the information I have provided to you! As provided by Extremelee’s blog post *Numa Numa Dances* *Ahem* This website has in-depth knowledge on how to use what are called “Key Metrics”:

Key Metrics are usually a ratio of something measuring an action to visits and visitors of a website. An example is finding a ratio of which visitors to your blog stayed 20 minutes or more, and which categories of your blog did they view the most? This can help in determining the type of category content to focus on, and maybe focus your entire blog to it to generate ample amounts of revenue. In addition it can help on which type of ads to display. For instance if you have a cooking blog, and most of your visitors stayed 20 minutes or more to read recipes on quick breakfasts, it would be important to focus ads on say toaster ovens, a brand of egg or something of that nature.

To read more on this exciting new realm of analyzing your site data and increasing revenue, please visit “Using Webtrends” over at Jimnovo! Blog on!!

One important aspect of running a site is to know your visitors. If you know your users, you can find out what they’re looking for, and how they came to your site. You should check your logs regularly to track any changes in the behavior of the people who visit your site, and also to see which areas of the world they’re from. This can help in many ways.

For example, if you write about hockey and focus on Canadian hockey, you may find that most of the people come to your site by typing the word “hockey” in search engines, and that they’re from France. You can then start writing about hockey in France also, to cater to those people too if you wish and thus convert them into loyal readers.

One such tool for mapping out your users visually through their geographic location is gVisit. Gvisit [not owned by Google, by the way] uses Google Maps to plot a diagram of the last 10 people who visited your site, and which part of the world they probably came from. You can then zoom down to their probable exact location, down to their street map and name. The general information of their geographic location [such as their continent] will help you a lot in knowing what types of users your site is attracting.

The Uniform Server (aka UniServer or MiniServer) is a free opensource all-in-one fully powered webserver that comes with Apache, MySQL, PHP and Perl as standard. Either use it for production or as a live server, perfect for both developers and webmasters alike. Portable enough to store on your USB keypen (20megs in total) and is easy enough to start, simply double click the start.bat file in the UniServer directory and you’re ready to go. (Note: To get the control panel displayed in the screenshot above, you will need to download and install the UniTray plugin from their site.)

The Uniform Server was first developed by Taras Slobodskyy as an application for his clients, but later on, moved to becoming this free and open source project. It’s the perfect system for both beginner webmasters and experienced developers, a fully powered webserver you can take with you on a USB Stick or even your camera’s flash drive. The perfect sales presentation tool. It’s the new world WAMP Package.

This wasn’t as easy to setup as XAMPP. However this does seem more stable than XAMPP and by that I mean I’ve tested it myself. So just remember to read the user manual, download the right plugins, follow the on-screen instructions carefully and you’ll be up and running within 10-20 minutes.

Ping is the method to let some well-known sites know that you have recently updated your blog. This is a little bit different in concept than the traditional ping, which you use to ping a computer on a network to see if it responds or not. When you ping your blog, it sends a note to the site you pinged letting that site know that your site has fresh content. People visit these big web-sites, often, to find out a list of recently updated sites. The whole wide web is so big, that it is almost impossible to see another site being updated without having a reference to it. You can bring that reference to the attention of the people through the pings. One of the most famous site that falls into that category, and has been around for a while, is Weblogs.com .

There is one basic rule we should follow when using this technique; if we update our blog every 5 minutes during any time period, we should not send a ping every 5 minutes. While it may bring in more visitors, sending a ping repeatedly within very short time spans may actually get a site banned from the site that is receiving the ping, as such a technique is also used by those who simply wish to have their site noticed more often, whether or not they have updated content on their sites.

Many blog publishing tools offer you the option of pinging Weblogs.com or some other popular sites. There are several places you can send a ping to, which is a problem today as webmasters and writers have to ping numerous sites repeatedly to let them know that the site has been updated. One of the online tools that allow you to ping numerous sites at the same time within one interface is Ping-O-Matic.

If you have a web company and you need to send your customers invoices, consider Blinksale.

With Blinksale, it’s a breeze to…

• Send elegantly formatted invoices to your customers’ email
• Send payment reminders when an invoice is past-due
• Send thank-you messages when an invoice is closed
• Track open, past-due, and closed invoices
• Add PayPal payment links to your invoices
• Customize the look and feel of your invoices with CSS
• Subscribe to your invoices with iCal & RSS

So forget those sub-par invoices you’ve been sending your customers. With Blinksale make them feel that paying you is a good experience. Everybody wins.

Did you know that if you have a Yahoo account, you also have a free blogging account with Yahoo called Yahoo! 360°? Similarly, did you know that if you had a Microsoft Hotmail account, you also already had a free blogging account with Microsoft called MSN Spaces?

Both sites allow you to post with editors that help you post pictures and change fonts for your posts. With Yahoo 360°, you get a domain name like http://360.yahoo.com/username , where “username” is your Yahoo user id. With MSN Spaces, you get a domain name like http://spaces.msn.com/members/yourname, where “yourname” can be anything that is available and that you wish, even if it is different than your MSN username. MSN Spaces is also integrated into MSN Messenger. MSN allows you to update your blog through the online interface or through your mobile phone. Yahoo allows you to post your entries through the online interface, mobile phone, and also through the Yahoo Messenger.

To see an example of what can be achieved with Yahoo 360°, you can visit the Yahoo 360° blog page. You can do the same, to see some examples of a MSN Spaces blog, at the MSN Spaces directory.

A few days ago Google announced Blogger for Word, an add-in that lets you post directly from Microsoft Word to your Blogger Account.

Blogger for Word installs as a simple toolbar that lets you open an existing post, and save or publish your current document. After typing out a post, Blogger for Word prompts for your account and password and then loads the post quickly and correctly. If you’re a Blogger user and you own a copy of Microsoft Word, you might want to look into this free download. Blogger for Word is compatible with versions of Windows XP/2000 and Microsoft Word 2000 and up.

Link via LifeHacker.

One thing that most blogging software lacks the most is an in-built spellchecker. I for one admit to not being a great speller, especially when typing quicker than my brain can keep up with. So you can imagine my sheer delight when I discovered the SpellCheck feature that comes with Google Toolbar. Type any text into any form then click the SpellCheck icon to correct all those (if any) embarrassing spelling mistakes. Other cool features available in Google Toolbar are: Word translator, popup blocker, auto-fill (for forms) and much more.

Bloggers beware. Poor spelling and grammar in your blog entries puts people off from visiting regularly. So get yourself a copy of Google Toolbar or consider using wBlogger reviewed in an earlier post by Bes.

If you write content regularly for any site, you may already be aware of how important a writing tool is for you. Whether you use Notepad to write your articles or something else, you know that revising your content and analyzing it a few times before publishing it is better than writing it directly into a page and then publishing it without any revisions. If have a blog, sometimes you may need something more advanced than simply typing your content. Sometimes you may need an editor designed specifically for blogging. One of the most popular blog post editors out there is wBloggar, available in many different languages.

wBloggar comes with many useful features, such as font changing capabilities, preview option to preview your final content before publishing it, a spell checker, and more. It is compatible with dozens of CMS [Content Management Systems] systems out there, including WordPress. You can post new articles, save drafts, or edit already existing articles on your site. The tool offers the options to upload your post along with images, so that you don’t have to upload the images related to your articles separately.

The tool is also a WYSIWYG [What You See Is What You Get] editor, so working with or without the knowledge of html is almost the same, and you can achieve the same results in both cases for your articles. On top of that, the program allows you to ping weblogs.com anytime you post or update an article. The program is free to download and use, and currently runs on all Windows platforms.

A blogging tool for blogger.com members with a mobile device.

AvantBlog is a very simple tool that allows you to post to your blog from your Palm or WinCE device. This version of AvantBlog only works with Blogger.com, the author says that future versions will have support for other blogging systems. We’ll hold him to his word for you

If anyone else knows of any other Palm based blogging utilities please drop me an email with details.