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30 Aug 10 3 Click-Based Contest That Will Help Your Blog Grow

Organizing a contest is a great way to pull your visitors to your blog. Many bloggers use this means to generate traffic and backlinks. For last three articles we are talking about this. In the last article we talked about content-based contests, and carrying our discussion further from there, we will be talking about 3 click-based contests in this article.

3 Click-based contest that you may run

Tweet me contest

Twitter is known for its capability to send visitors to a website or blog. You can leverage this tool by starting a tweet me contest. Ask people to tweet a particular post on which the contest is running to get an entry into tweet me contest for the grand prize. Set a time-frame for which the contest will run and actively start talking about it.

Vote for me contest

If there is one contest that you want to run, this is it. It has elements of both content-based and click-based contests. You can ask your visitors to share some tips or a short piece on your blog, which will be open for public voting. The winner will be the one that gets maximum vote.

This is a wonderful way to get traffic as well as backlinks because people participating in this contest will make sure that many people vote on their entry, for which they will promote their entry. It means more visitors to your blog. Sweet!

Send people to me contest

In one word this could be called traffic contest, to participate in which the participants will need to send people to your blog through their websites. You can ask people to post a link to any of their websites, which their visitors will click to visit your page. The website that sends most visitors to your blog will get the prize. For this you will need to install Google analytics in your blog and monitor it for traffic sources.

With this we came to the end of this post. Though I have just listed 3 click-based contests, there are many more that you can come up with. As I see it, to reap maximum benefit from the contests, you should use a combination of both types of contests.

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07 Nov 09 Why the Heck Should I Look at Traffic Stat?

Well, if you think everyone look at their traffic log then you are sadly mistaken. Not everyone and every company that owns a website is web savvy. Most of the people do not understand the importance of analyzing website usage statistics. In this post, my goal is to help them understand how critical it is for the success of their business that website traffic log is analyzed.

Reason 1: To know from where the traffic is coming and why

Is it Google or Yahoo or Bing that is sending you the maximum traffic? Or is it the social media sites like Facebook or twitter? Is Digg or StumbleUpon working for you or not? What kind of posts or articles is getting more traffic? Is your effort to get qualified sales lead paying off well or not? These are some of the questions you need to answer in order to make an informed decision about the course of action for your website.

Reason 2: To Track the website usage behavior

The information you get out of your website stat does not just tell you about how many people visited your site and from where. It also tells you about the visitors’ behavior: what they did, which pages they visited, which element got most attention and which caused them to leave, etc. You can use this data to fix the pages that cause the visitors to leave, and use more of the elements that interest visitors.

Reason 3: To know how effective your marketing is

You need to know how effective the dollar you spent on marketing are, and for that you will need to analyze the data. Use Google Analytics or any other analysis tool to figure out which keyword and which search engine is fetching you more traffic. When you are buying keywords from programs like Google Adwords then this information will save you money. This information will also help you drop the useless keywords and purchase the ones that work.

Reason 4: To know what visitors like and what they don’t

The analysis of traffic data will also tell you what is the common entry point to your website and what works as an exit gate. This knowledge will help you amplify the things that work and remove the page from where maximum people leave.

Reason 5: To know the problem in your site

Web monitoring and analysis tools will also tell you which browser, operating system, screen resolution, and color depth your visitor’s computer has. This information will help you understand how your visitors see your website. You can use this knowledge to tweak the site accordingly.

Reason 6: You will get to know your faceless visitors

Every marketer wishes to know its target audience in and out, and it is the privilege of online marketers that they can know their audience if they wish to by analyzing the traffic log of their websites. The understanding of your visitors will help you target your marketing effort much better.

There are many analysis and monitoring tool that you can use, but my personal favorite is Google Analytics and Google Webmaster tools.

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23 Apr 09 SEO SIMPLIFIED – Cool Google Tool

I believe you must be excited by the keyword research tools we discussed in the previous article of the series. You must have noticed my love for Google AdWord Keyword Tool in that article. In this article will talk in detail about how you can use Google AdWord Keyword Tool to your liking, and how other tools like Google Trend, Google Suggest, and Google AdWord Traffic estimator will assist you in doing your job effectively. Google is important, rather very important, as it has arguably become synonymous with the Internet search. Hence, in the course of this article, we will start from Google Suggest and will end our journey at Google Analytics, passing through Google Trend, Google AdWord Keyword and Google AdWord Traffic.

In the last article, we discussed about the art part of the keyword research. If you find yourself stuck, and could not find a list of tentative word for your site, you do not need to worry, Google is here to assist you with its Google Suggest tool. This tool is a good starting point to gather a list of words and phrases related to the keyword entered in the search box. if you type, “marketing books” in the search box of Google.com, a list will drop down with the phrases like, “marketing books online,” “marketing books free,” and “marketing books review” etc. with the number of pages (results) written in green on the extreme left of the drop-down list corresponding to each suggested key phrases. This tool can be helpful in building a primary list of keywords, and it will also help you in finding the combinations that goes with your tentative keyword.

Once the basic list of keywords is ready, you can use Google Trend to check the popularity of any of the keywords from the list. The popularity of a search term is expressed in terms of the proportion of the total searches. Google Trend will also provide you a list of most searched term, and this list is maintained since 2004. Different lists of “most searched” terms are also created for different regions. This tool also let you compare the popularity of one list of search terms with another list of search term. You can also ascertain the nature of the search terms and how and where it is used.

Once the list has been filtered out through Google Trend, you can check the keywords and key phrases from the list in Google AdWord Keyword tool for average traffic details. We have discussed much about this tool in the last article, so I will leave this here only.

Once the keywords has been selected, it is time to check how many clicks an ad related to the chosen keyword will get each day. Google AdWord Traffic Estimator comes handy in this phase. As the name suggest, this will give you an approx estimation of total daily traffic for the chosen keywords, and it will also help you know the approximate daily expenditure on that keyword, if you want to do an AdWord Campaign.

The last tool that we are going to discuss in brief here is Google Analytics. This tool comes handy in analyzing the performance of your website, and to give you the statistics based on many different parameters. This tool is a must for every webmaster to analyze its traffic. In addition to the above written tool, you can also use Google Webmaster tool to make your website Google friendly. This tool is worth exploring as this gives you a complete understanding of how your websites are doing in Google’s search.

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