Today I am going to discuss something that used to bore me terribly, but which today I find very exciting – Blog Testing, Research and Analytics.

Tracking and testing your website is one of key things you can do to increase profits and drive more traffic. Using the tools below you are able to do a lot of really cool things – from finding out where your visitor comes from, which pages your visitors spend most time on, where your visitor are looks on your web-page (eye tracking), what links they click and even which opt-in box color works best for your website.

Testing can mean HUGE money. For example is you were getting around 30,000 visitors a month to your blog and were making just $5000 there is no doubt in my opinion you can make a lot more by researching the actions / behavior of your visitors using the tools I am recommending below. You could see your earnings double, treble or even multiple 10 times plus as a result of using these tools. Indeed some testers have seen as much as a 1000% increase with millions of dollars in sales. For a business like Amazon.com it could even mean billions of extra dollars in sales.

Important Fact:

A lot of bloggers I meet find Testing and Analytic’s boring – it isn’t fun for them and generally anything that is not FUN we avoid doing. But I am going to suggest it can be a lot of FUN – indeed I like to think of Blog Testing as tweaking an already powerful engine to get even better performance. I compete with myself to find little tweaks and changes to see if I can beat my my previous best performance — a bit like athletes do I suppose.

If you can think of it like that then you will find these tools a remarkable addition to your blogging business.

Let me know your own thoughts on testing and recommendations for any tools I may have missed out in the comments below.

To Our Blogging Success

Michael

Top Blog Testing Tools

Google Analytics

OK I shall start with the one TOOL that I hope most of my readers are already familiar with: Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the first tool you should install on your blog. Google Analytics gives you amazing insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Very easy to use and very flexible (Just like about everything Google creates) this tool allows you to see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new way. With Google Analytics, you’re more prepared to write better-targeted ads, strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites. Visit Site >>

CrazyEgg

Ever wondered how your visitors are using your website? CrazyEgg allows you to see a lot of really cool information about your readers, you can see where they are looking at a page, which links are being clicked the most and lot’s of other great information. Visit Site >>

Google Keyword Tool

I haven’t been using this tool much till recently when I have been working on SEO. What you do is you type your keyword of your post, for example Web Hosting and it will give you all the other search terms people will be searching for. Now I take these terms and use them as tags and meta keywords to help me rank high in Google. It also lets me know which term will get the most traffic so that I know which one to use for my post title. Visit Site >>

Yahoo Site Explorer

This tool is great, basically to rank high in search engines you need lots of great links. Find someone who is ranking higher then you in your niche, put their URL in the Yahoo Site Explorer and you can see all the sites that link to it. Now go to these sites and negotiate advertising deals, link exchanges and guest blog posts. Visit Site >>

Go Try This

One thing that is really important as an affiliate, is knowing what converts. This tool shows me where my affiliates are getting clicked, so for example, I sell HostGator on my site and I want to know which page is converting the highest, this tool will tell me which page is giving me the most clicks. Also, it will redirect your URL’s so instead of giving a long HostGator affiliate url, I can have a URL such as IncomeDiary.com/hostgator – which I have read, improves conversions. Visit Site >>

Alexa

Although not very accurate for their traffic details, it is a very useful tool. For those who don’t know how Alexa works, it basically ranks every website in the world by the amount of people who visit a site that are using the Alexa toolbar. Visit Site >>

Quantcast

Great piece of software for those though are buying advertising space, this tool allows you to see who you typically reader is, where they live, how old they are, how much they earn a year etc.. Visit Site >>

Market Samurai

Find out how to uncover “gold-nugget” keywords – each of these keywords can send hundreds, even thousands of free visitors to your site each day. Using this tool you can discover exactly how to beat the competition, and get front-page rankings in Google for high-traffic keywords in weeks or days – not months or years. Visit Site >>

Google Website Optimizer

This is one of the hottest pieces of software I’m using right now to test my site. It allows you to test different aspects of your website, for example say your not sure if your sidebar is converting well, design a second sidebar and use Google Website Optimizer to test which one pulls the most clicks. Visit Site >>

Website Grader

This tool basically allows you to learn everything about your site, how well it’s doing in the search engines, is it getting much traffic, how many social sites are linking to you.. etc. Visit Site >>

Tests You Should Try On Your Website

Increasing Affiliate Box Clicks

Go to your Google Analytics and pick one of your most visited pages, for me it was my Top 30 Earning Blogs post. I had a paragraph in it where I was promoting affiliate product, I knew it wasn’t making me much money so I decided to run CrazyEgg on this blog post. Over a couple days I saw that the affiliate links didn’t receive any clicks at all, I remember my friend told me using a stop sign really helps draw eyes to things. So using these two bits of information I tested different stops signs and ended up using a green sign to match the site. Adding this sign increased the clicks on affiliate links from 0 to 12 clicks a day. Admittedly not a lot of clicks but a lot more then what I had before, I now have rolled this out so that I use it at the bottom of every blog post because I used these tools and found it worked

More from some smart kid here:

Are you looking for an automated tool to ping your blog? This is a great way to get the word out about your new content!
simply go to:

http://up8.org/service_pingservice_index

Here we are, 2010 is in full swing and what do you have to show for it? Is your site on pace for your expectations for the year? If your site is hitting a bit lower than what you had expected here is a list of our top 5 traffic building techniques in 2010.

1) Create unique content!! – Google is rooting for you, they really are. What do they want in return? unique content!! make sure your website or blog is giving visitors something worth finding.

2)Articles – With the exception of going viral, this is one of the best methods of traffic building of 2010. Time after time we have seen success from article writing and you can to! Want to know the best article sites to post to? they are not all created equal. If you want our private list of the best article sites just shoot me a letter. I will send it to you for free.

3)Press Release- Dont be scurred! You dont have to be a guru to create a press release. Its as easy as an article and it creates some great links and traffic.

4) Social Networking – The art of advertising, without advertising. Do this correctly and you can build some amazing traffic and links. Start with sites like Digg and StumbleUpon and go from there!

5)Be everywhere! post in forums, post in blogs, tag your name and signature line on facebook, myspace and every other site you can find. Remember your customer will read your advertisement up to 7 times before actually clicking on your link.

Want some free help? Contact me, we offer free SEO coaching. Find the contact me box on the homepage.

I am not sure if you are aware but Google really respects .EDU, .ORG and .GOV sites. If you had the capability to find EDU blogs and comment there you could read some great posts as well as provide meaningful feedback. We are sharing the scoop with you and wanted to let you know of a great tool to find EDU blog sites in your niche.

Just click on the link:

FIND EDU BLOG SITES FREE

There is a stigma in SEO that portrays the secret art of high ranking as only attainable from a mysterious potion of mixing overpriced consultants with confusing SEO definitions to create a result of page 1 ranking. Well I have good news and its not going to cost you, in fact if you are willing to put in a little of the leg work, your efforts can actually start paying you! Here are 5 easy steps to improve SEO on your site that won’t cost you a thing!

1)Create unique title pages, page descriptions, keywords and content on as many possible pages. We think that Google likes unique content. From our research, a strong factor to high page ranking is having a large amount of unique content pages.

2)Create inbound links. We think that Google likes inbound links. Search engines interpret these inbound links as recommendations to your site. The more inbound links you have the more recommendations you have. If I have the opportunity and all other things are equal, I would choose the candidate with more recommendations, wouldn’t you?

3)Create a Blog- Create a blog on your sites topic. Write it in everyday. Occasionally link back to your main site referring to a product or service. Obtain inbound links from other blog members by posting comments on blogs from similar sectors as your site.

4)Write articles. Write articles like this one and post them on an articles site. You might read this post and think what I have is interesting to say. You might read about this subject and want to learn about other subjects I discuss at my site. You might click the link at the bottom of my post to read my other blogs and when you do I receive another visitor. I also use the keyword in the signature of my article to receive a recommendation from the article site back to my site for the keyword I choose. Some article sites have a high page rank which means they have more authority making a bigger recommendation then if a link came from a low page rank site. Good, now your getting it!

5)KISS. That’s “keep it simple stupid”. There’s no magic potion for good SEO and there’s no black hat method that will work forever. Wear a white hat, focus on the fundamentals and basics. Do the basics and do them well. Don’t give up. Expect to put several months of effort into your SEO effort before you first start seeing an effect, but when you do, look out!

You can build the greatest site known to man but if you don’t get the word out, unlike “Field Of Dreams”, they might never come. Take a trip with us to learn 5 easy tips to get your site indexed fast.

1)Add Your New (or old) site to webmaster tools in google. This is an invaluable tool to see what google really thinks about your website.

2)Submit your site to social bookmarking sites-

We were able to successfully get a site indexed for the first time in just a few hours by using Digg.com, a popular social marketing site with one of our recent clients.

3)Publish an article on your sites topic.-

Ezinearticles can take up to 10 days to get approved. Try posting your original content article at GoArticles.com or Buzzle.com for even faster recognition.

4)Comment on Blogs

Find 5-10 recent blogs that are popular and relevant to your new website and were posted in the last 2 days. Read the blog and make a valuable comment the contributes to the discussion.  In the “website” box of the form make sure and include your site.

5)Create, Submit and Ping that Site-Map!

Depending on what type of site you operate, you can create an XML site map in just a few minutes and then submit and ping your site map for super fast indexing. Once you have created your site map you can ping it in your webmaster tools section or submit it here:

http://google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.mysite.com/sitemap.xml

Bing Here:

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=www.MYSITE.com/sitemap.xml

Ask:

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.MYSITE.com/sitemap.xml

The frustrating fact is that we get so many spam comments on our blog a say, sometimes we just want to disallow comments all together. So the question of the day is, ”Should I Allow Blog Comments On My Blog?”

We think the answer is Yes! After all is said and done, spam comments are extremely annoying, but there are several things you can do to decrease the time you spend on wedding through spam comments. Here are a few suggestions:

Askimat- This is an invaluable tool for the wordpress platform, which we use on HItBrand Consulting. The Askimat plugin is already preloaded  in your plugins section. All you need to do to activate it is submit your Key, which you can obtain from providing askimat an email address to register. Once activated, Askimat will aggressively locate spam posts on your blog and automatically place them in a spam folder. This is trully one of the best tools to fight against blog spam.

IP Tracking- Each time a blog comment is posted the wordpress platform will show you the commenter’s IP address. You can test to see if this user is a possible spammer by simply cutting and pasting the IP address into a google.com search.

Good Ol’ Common Sense- Read the post, does it make sense and is it relevant to the post? Does the link go to a spammy website?

Comments allow an important way to connect with your readers and we believe with the simpe tips provided here, you can create a high traffic and beneficial blog.