Are you considering blogging as a hobby or part time/full time professional career and aren't sure whether or not to add Blogger to your shortlist of blogging platforms? Well, I suggest you take a look at a recently published booked by Lee Jordan titled, "Blogger: Beyond the Basics." Jordan touches on every aspect of Blogger including customized templates, integrating RSS/Social bookmarking, working with your blog's HTML code, linking and adding widgets. In addition to the step by step by examples mentioned in all the chapters, the book comes with a CD so you can easily try out the examples on your own blog.

Blogger: Beyond the Basics, actually starts out by discussing how you can leverage blogs and how to predefine the goals for your blog - which really helps ads some focus before you dive in head first. Coming from a search marketing background, I really appreciated how Jordan took this book to the next level and clearly explained how to apply search engine optimization strategies to improve the performance of your blog and how to use Google Analytics to measure all aspects of your blog. Get your copy of the book here.

I got an opportunity to catch up with the author, Lee Jordan, to get her thoughts on why she wrote the book, who the book is targeted towards, and the benefits of using Blogger.

[Manoj]: What was the inspiration behind writing "Blogger - Beyond the Basics"

[Lee Jordan]: I fell into writing this book. Dave, the acquisitions editor at Packt asked what I thought about an advanced book about Blogger. After looking around I realized it had been about a year (a long time in blogging years) since a book covering advanced topics for Blogger had come out. There had been so many changes too. Blogger had moved to a "new" XML based template structure and was rapidly adding new social media features. I subscribe to the Blogger help list on Google Groups and saw many frustrated people having problems with the same topics over and over. It was a great opportunity to give back to the blogging community and learn more myself.

[Manoj]: Who is the book targeted towards?

[Lee Jordan]: The book is targeted towards people who already know the basics of blogging with Blogger and are now ready to do more advanced work on their blog. Popular advanced topics include transforming a basic template into the three column one, adding custom colors and graphics to the template, adding customized modules, and search engine optimization.

[Manoj]: Is Blogger a legitimate platform for people to use for business?

[Lee Jordan]: You do not have to be a programmer or a web designer to use Blogger successfully. Features include multiple users, customizable templates, podcast and videocast support, and an easy to use administration area.Blogger has a custom domain feature which allows well known corporations such as GirlScouts.org to host the backend of their blog on Blogger and customize it to match the rest of their site. The integration of Blogger with Feedburner, Google Analytics, and YouTube means a business can quickly set up a social media blog. The developers of Blogger are constantly working on improvements and new features. Add in the vibrant help community on Google Groups and you have an active support system for businesses and entrepreneurs who blog.

[Manoj]: How does Blogger compare against other platforms such as WordPress/Typepad

[Lee Jordan]: All three make it easy to post. The real differences come with features, administration, and templates. Blogger is best for those who want someone else to deal with keeping the blog software updated and are looking for an inexpensive way to start blogging. Wordpress and Typepad are better for people who have a technical resource or the time to keep up with software patches.

Blogger does not come with a wide range of templates for businesses that can be customized, but makes it very easy to manage modules and other features. The Wordpress interface has an extensive number of templates, but managing the blog requires multiple administration dashboards, some hidden where the beginner would have difficulty finding them. It also does not give hosted users the option to use a rich text editor for text modules. Typepad has great commenting features, but I haven't seen many new things happening with it feature wise.

[Manoj]: The biggest advantages Blogger has is ease of administration and flexibility. Another advantage is Blogger blogs are free. You can easily add modules and do not have to pay additional fees to edit the CSS or perform other customizations. Wordpress users who want to customize or add modules are better off downloading a copy of the Wordpress platform and hosting it themselves to avoid paying for the right to edit the CSS files or install modules. This will require paying for a domain name and a hosting provider, but it may cost less in the long run.

[Manoj]: If you could pick out 3 or 4 main objectives or lessons readers should get from this book, what should they be?

[Lee Jordan]:

1. Create a "mission statement" - Plan the focus of your blog to guide you when making decisions about how it looks, content, and interactivity.
2. Generate useful content focused on visitors - Don't be afraid to "go deep" on a particular feature or process. Blogs are a great medium for creating a library of information over time.
3. Set a schedule for posting and updates and keep to it. Consistency over time is crucial in establishing a fan base and maintaining a track record of content with search engines
4. Optimize your blog for search engines using "White hat" techniques and visit the search engine guides of Google and other major search engines regularly for changes

[Manoj]: How has blogger grown and developed as a platform in the last 2-3 years.

[Lee Jordan]: Originally Blogger lacked many of the features such as linkbacks that users of WordPress and Typepad took for granted. It was a basic blogging platform for beginners. It has matured into a rich and robust platform with many options and tools for bloggers of every level, from beginner to expert. The greatest changes have happened over the last year, with more features added than can be listed here.

Labels: Blogger, Blogging, SEO

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• There’s a new look for the Blogger Dashboard, which we think you’ll find more attractive and functional. If you have a ton of blogs (as we do) try out the “hide” and “show all” links to help manage the list.
• Google Gadgets in your Layouts blog can now set their height automatically (if the gadget author supports it). Read more about adding Google Gadgets to your blog.
• AdSense page elements can now optionally have image ads. They’ve found image ads have a higher click-through rate, so you might get more money if you turn them on.
• They wrote up a Features page to help you keep track of everything you can do with Blogger.
• The Flag Blog button in the Blogger navbar now pops up a window for you to tell us why you think the blog violates our terms of service. Flag Blog is always handled exclusively by human reviewers, not the automated spam locking system, so this information will better help them decide what, if any, action should be taken.

Labels: Blogger, Blogging

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Content marketing experts know all about the importance of a good blog in spreading a message, building a brand and creating a loyal audience. But not all experts are created equal, and neither are their blogs. Custom content education and marketing matching site Junta42 today announced the release of the second Top 42 Content Marketing Blogs, selected from among the more than one hundred blogs that specialize in the field.

The newly released list offers updated rankings from those established in Junta42's inaugural Top 42 Content Marketing Blogs list, which premiered in January 2008. The complete Top 42 Content Marketing Blogs is available at http://www.junta42.com/top_42_content_marketing_blogs/.

The Top Five Blogs Include:

• Copyblogger, from writer and entrepreneur Brian Clark
• Online Marketing Blog, from Lee Odden, CEO of TopRank Online Marketing.
• PR 2.0, from Brian Solis, a principal of Future Works.
• ContentMarketingToday, from content marketing strategist Newt Barrett.
• Marketing Interactions, from Ardath Albee, founder of her eponymous marketing agency.

Web Analytics World is currently number 50 on the Junta list so we just missed the cut but hopefully we'll move up the list very soon.

For complete information on the selection criteria, go to http://www.junta42.com/resources/Top_42_Blogs_Selection_Criteria/.

Labels: Blogging

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For purposes of this study, heavy bloggers are defined as the heaviest 20
percent of blog visitors who account for 84 percent of all the time spent on
blogging sites.Given that blogs can often be described as both informative and
entertaining, it is not surprising that heavy users of blog sites are more likely than the average Internet user to consume news and entertainment content online. They are significantly more likely to consume content at politics and general news sites, and also consume a disproportionate amount of content on entertainment news, humor, movies and photo-sharing sites.

Labels: Blogging

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WordPress is an excellent blog platform which provides complete customization which is both user and search engine friendly. Below are some of the tips, tricks and plug-ins that I use when I setup WordPress blogs:

Custom Meta/Title Tags

There are numerous WordPress Meta Tag plug-ins but I like to use this one offered by G-loaded. This Meta Tag plug-in adds Meta Tags to the Front Page, Single Posts, Static Pages and Archived pages. It is compatible for the following versions: v1.5.2 - v2.3.2.

For title tags I use the following code so that the title for the home page uses the blog's description and individual pages get the title of the post gets puts at the start of the title. The title can be updated in a file called header.php.



Feeds

By default, WordPress truncates content within a feed. I personally feel that offering full content within Feeds is actually more beneficial because it allows users to get a complete concept for a given post. Additionally I have noticed a higher number of subscribers when I switched from a partial feed to a complete feed. Using a plug-in such as CompleteRSS is a great way to offer full feeds.

With CompleteRSS you can say goodbye to invalid RSS and partial entries — your feeds show your entire article no matter what, bringing you the traffic you deserve, and no longer use the very-much abused 'content:encoded' tags that cause many feed readers such a headache.

I am not sure what the deal is with HTML in WordPress (or Blogger for that matter) but they constantly mess up. There have been numerous occasions where I tried to copy and paste an HTML table from a different blog into one my blogs and ended up losing the table formatting completely. My suggestion is to find some sort of FCK Editor Plugin to replace the default editor OR to use the "copy from word" option located in the default editor. It looks like this:

Labels: Blogging, Web Analytics, WordPress

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• Clearer identity options on the comment form, which now highlights some of the more popular OpenID providers more obviously.
• Transliteration is now available in Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu as well as Hindi
• Posts with more than 200 comments have them split across multiple pages.
• Layouts blogs now have a “Layouts” tab instead of “Template.”
• Better Persian translations and other BiDi layout fixes
• A fix to the long-standing incorrect label counts bug
• Safari 3 support for the Layouts template editor pages
• Faster loading times for the post editor
• Improved international support in the post editor’s date and time fields
• Compatibility fixes for Picasa’s BlogThis! button

Labels: Blogger, Blogging

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• URL vs. Title: The URL of your post doesn't have to be the exact same as the title of your post. Creating a custom URL allows you to insert additional keywords which can benefit your post from a search engine perspective. Some blogging platforms such as WordPress allow you to define a custom URL for a post (also known as the post slug) whereas platforms such as Blogger construct the URL by taking the post's title word for word (it also applies a character limit for the URL). For platforms that don't allow custom naming I recommend creating a keyword rich title initially and then after posting, changing it to something enticing to draw in readers.
• Interlinking of Top Posts / Hot Topics: As a blogger you will occasionally write a post which will considerably outperform your other posts OR you will blog about a hot topic in your industry which you hope will perform well in the search engines. For both cases, a good idea is to hard code keyword rich links to these posts on your blog's side bar or in your footer so that they receive added attention from search crawlers and readers.
• Re-Ignite Past Posts: Staying on the topic of hot posts, it is often a good idea to keep the momentum rolling on popular topics by updating their content or adding 2nd and 3rd parts to the original post. What has worked well for me in the past is to create a 3 or 4 part series on a popular topic and then combine all the posts into a PDF which readers can download.
• Yahoo/Google Finance: When writing about publicly traded companies it is a good idea to mention the company's full name or even their stock symbol. Many times these types of posts get aggregated into a given company's news section of their Google/Finance page which leads to more readers coming back to your blog.
• The Importance of Variety: Offering posts which vary in length, topics, format (lists vs. news vs. opinion vs. interviews), or content type (images vs. video. vs text) can prolong the life of your readers. Mixing up your posts will keep your readers coming back rather than being bored by the same old content day after day.
• Relationships with Companies/Bloggers: It is important to have relationships with companies or their PR firms because they will potentially release information to you before it goes to the public giving you an edge on your competition. Additionally, companies can offer you access to software/services during test periods before it is officially released.
  
  Relationships with other bloggers is key because they can help you spread the word on your most potent posts as well add value to your blog by guest blogging from time to time.

If you're looking to kick start your blogging in 2008, check out our Blog Setup and Configuration Services.

Labels: Blogging

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Labels: Blogging

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• Increases Exposure of your content
• Helps build your reputation as an author and thought leader
• Generates back links to your original content
• Allows more feedback on your content

• An Additional 4 Tips for Video and Image 39 Sphinns
• 9 Ideas for Blog Posts When You Are Stuck 43 Sphinns
• 4 Tips and 11 Resources for Increasing Subscribers 18 Sphinns
• Google Indexing Even Faster? 29 Sphinns

Labels: Blogging

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We are pleased to announce a new service offering from Web Analytics World: Blog Setup and Configuration. Blogging has become one of the premier ways to compliment your business with customer service, support, updates and community so leveraging a blog should be a no brainer. We bring many years of organic search marketing, technical analysis and blogging expertise to the table therefore we can help you throughout the entire setup process:

• Domain Registration and Hosting
• Installation of WordPress or Blogger
• Template Customization and Branding
• Logo Design
• Plug-in Configuration
• Web Analytics Implementation
• Feed Subscription Setup
• Google/Yahoo/MSN Webmaster Tools Setup
• Social Media Integration
• On going support
• SEO, Blogging Best Practices
• Consultation and Strategy

Here is a sample of some our most recent work: Global Thoughtz, Vinewz, British Columbia Tours, ASK Enquiro and of course Web Analytics World.

For more information or a customized quote email: manoj.jasra@gmail.com

Labels: Blogging

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• How to Create a Successful Facebook Group
• Ultimate Local Search Optimization Guide
• Social Network Comparison (MySpace vs. Orkut vs. Facebook)
• Comparing: Gmail vs Hotmail vs. Yahoo Mail
• Guest Blogger: Alex Cohen's 1 Month Web Analytics Boot Camp

Download Here!

If you find this PDF valuable consider sharing it with your colleagues or linking to this post. We plan on releasing more free PDFs in the near future so if your organization is interested in sponsoring the next version send me an email: mjasra@gmail.com

Labels: Blogging

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• Providing your perspective on hot industry stories.
• Staying on top of the latest news by making relationships with PR Firms.
• Using Google Hot Trends to figure out the buzz on the Internet.
• Relating topics outside your niche to your industry (i.e.: sports or travel).
• Inviting guest bloggers to write for you periodically.

• Reigniting Old Topics: Dig into your stats and figure out posts which have been historically popular (consider seasonality if appropriate) and then write an update to those posts explaining how strategies have changed or Part 2.
• Credit Other Bloggers: In any given week there are dozens of posts and articles around your industry which people should definitely read. This is your opportunity to categorize these other posts and spread some link love. Both Search Engine Land and Marketing Pilgrim both do this on a regular basis.
• Create a Compilation: Have you ever written 3 or 4 posts on the same topic which you think an organization can circulate around to it's employees, then try combining those posts and offer them in a PDF version.
• Attend a Webinar: If you wanted you could probably attend 2 or 3 webinars everyday (and realistically 1 every 2 weeks) and for those who can't make it, provide a brief summary for them detailing the "nuggets" from the webinar.

Labels: Blogging

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• Hot Industry Stories: Everyday you hear about acquisitions, mergers, companies releasing new technology/services or even executives getting fired. Unless you are one of the first blogs to cover these stories, it becomes somewhat useless to your readers. Rather, I recommend you add your personal perspective on the story as well as help your readers leverage the news by offering advice on how to apply it to to their own businesses.


• Relationships with PR Firms: Try making relationships with PR firms who work for companies in your industry. It's a win/win situation, you get hot news off the press and the companies get publicity in exchange. As you become more authoritative, PR firms will begin to approach you first.
  
• Google Hot Trends: This an excellent way to determine the buzz across the Internet, however you do have to apply your own filters per industry. Google Hot Trends also allows you to see a graphical trend on the level of interest for a given topic.
  
• Correlating Common Interests: You probably enjoy other interests outside of your niche such as sports or politics, so why not bring something your other passions into your professional life? I like to sometimes use Google Trends, Technorati and Social Bookmarking to reference the NBA or sports playoffs.


• Guest Bloggers: When you're completely out of new topics try leveraging guest bloggers to offer their thoughts on new topics. This gives you a little break and gives your readers some fresh perspective to digest. Guest bloggers can be people from your industry or even fellow employees. Make sure to prescreen your writers so they adhere to your high quality of content.

Labels: Blogging

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• Do some research on the author of the blog by checking out their LinkedIn profile, MySpace Page, FaceBook Group, or other Social Networking profile.
• Find out how long the Blogger has been in the industry and how long they have been blogging for.
• Has the blogger spoken at any industry related conferences?
• Run a site:www.blog.com command to find out how many pages the blog has indexed
• Use Yahoo Site Explorer to find how many back links the blog has.
• From the back links above you should be able to determine the authority of the blogger by figuring it out networks/resources the blogger writes for.
• A couple of simple measurements are looking up the blog's Google PageRank as well its Technorati rank.
• Feed Subscribers are an excellent way to determine how many other people think of the blog as a useful resource.
• Use Blog Influence and Text Link Ads' Blog Juice.
• How many other industry related blogs reference this blog as well as include this blog in their blog roll?
• Create a quality score of your own by adding a blog to your reader and monitoring number of posts, number of strategic posts, number of breaking news posts and number of re-posts of industry news.
• Do a keyword search in Google Blog Search and try reading blogs that Google suggests in its "related blogs" section.
• Find out how many members the blog has in its community at MyBlogLog.
• Is the blogger providing valuable advice that you can apply to your business or is it just old news and outdated tactics?

Labels: Blogging

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Have you looked at your blog's stats lately and noticed that your blog's traffic is starting to plateau. Blogging is not simple, it takes a lot of hard work to continuously come up with new ideas for content and blog promotion. I remember last year at this time there were some excellent blog promotion strategies, however even some of those suggestions have been over exhausted. Some of these useful but sometimes over used suggestions included:

• Creating top 5, 10, 20 lists
• Submitting your blog to blog directories and Dmoz
• Using your blog's URL in your email signature
• Linking to your blog in MySpace

Thinking outside the box these days becomes challenging because the box is SO big. If you're looking for something new, give some of the blog promotion strategies below a try. They may not lead to instantaneous traffic nor are they necessarily easy to implement, but they will help you build your brand and help grow your long term traffic:

1. When writing a blog post trying using full names of organizations, using organizations' stock symbols and linking them to their Google Finance page (if applicable). Google Finance often has a section for blog posts related to an organization. If your post makes it onto a popular company's Google Finance page you can expect some decent referrals.
2. Release a free PDF of your blog's top posts or write a 4-5 part series on a given topic and develop that series into a PDF to give away for free. Within the PDF provide links for people to subscribe as well as information regarding advertisement opportunities.
3. Blogs such as the Google Blogs and Seth Godin's Blog have trackbacks turned on, meaning if you link to one of their posts that blog post will automatically generate a link back to your original post. This strategy has to be done in the right context because I definitely don't recommend linking to these blogs' posts in irrelevant context or overusing this tactic.
4. Rather than simply linking to your blog within your Facebook profile, develop a community surrounding your blog by developing a Facebook group. This can really expand virally if you have a large network of friends.
5. Reignite past hot topics with updates. If you wrote about "How Google Makes Money" last year, consider writing a quarterly or year update to this post.

*BONUS: People absolutely love widgets and apps, so I am going to give you a suggestion for an app to build: FeedBurner offers an API which allows you to retrieve a given blog's subscribers (if it's enabled), I would love to see an app which quickly allows you to compare subscribers between bloggers or EVEN better take a page out of GoogleFight's book and develop a FeedBurner Fight application.

The most fun and most difficult part of blog promotion is to be creative, although with millions of bloggers in the blogosphere it can become awfully challenging. To be successful, a blogger has to find their 'zone' and motivation, mine often comes when I start scribbling ideas on a piece of paper rather than typing them directly into my laptop. Sounds a little old school but it works.

Labels: Blog Promotion, Blogging

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"Two of the big challenges with blogs are finding content that is relevant and
accessing that content easily," said Jeff Ramminger, executive vice president,
KnowledgeStorm. "FindTech Blogs addresses both of these by aggregating quality
B2B-specific blog content and by evaluating blog content to ensure that it is
accurately categorized. In our blog and RSS feeds study, we found that 60% of respondents don't subscribe to a RSS feed, so this aggregation enables them to easily stay current on relevant blog content."

Labels: B2B, B2B Tech, Blogging

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Thanks to Jennifer Laycock and team, I have been given the opportunity to guest blog weekly at SearchEngineGuide.

I really enjoy writing/blogging so I think this will be a lot of fun and I will probably take advantage by blogging more than just once a week. You can catch some of my posts on the SearchEngineGuide home page or here: http://www.searchengineguide.com/jasra/

Labels: Blogging, SEO

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• How Bloggers Make Money from Blogs - Darren Rowse, ProBlogger.net
• How to Make Money From Your Blog - Steve Pavlina - who now makes $1000/day through blogging
• Washington Post shares how to Make Money off Your Blog
• Users share their tips on how to Make money blogging on 43 Things
• Get Paid to Blog through PayPerPost
• Jeff Wuorio for Microsoft Small Business: How to make money from your blog: 5 tips
• Robbin Good explains How to Make Money with Your Blog Site
• Maki at DoshDosh.com: How to Make Money Blogging: 7 Strategies to Help you Get Started Immediately
• Make Money from Your Blog - Matt Huggins
• Matt Bacak posted an Ezine how to: Make Money Blogging
• John Chow on How to Make Money Blogging - 52 Page PDF
• Make Money Blogging For Know More Media: 20 Open Blogs
• How To Make Money Blogging The Easy Way: HubPages Gets You Started by Michael Pick
• Seopher.com 8 ways to make money online in a short amount of time
• EbMug.com Learning How to Make Money Blogging
• Learning How to Make Money Blogging by Yaro @ Entrepeneurs Journey
• Bob King at GraphicTruth.com - Feeding the Beast - making blogging pay without selling your soul.
• See this Squidoo Lens: How to Monetize Your Website or Blog on Squidoo
• Ask Shane: Top 10 Blogs About Making Money Blogging
• How to Start a Blog and Make Money Online - in 10 Easy Steps
• Advertising Tactics that Simply Do Not Make Money - Web Analytics World
• Get Paid to Write Reviews
• Have you tried Reviewme.com?

If you have a suggestion for a link that needs to be added to this post, please leave a comment and I will add it.

Labels: Blogging, Make Money

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One of my favorite blogs to read is John Chow's http://www.johnchow.com/. The content is always fresh and John is never afraid to share his secrets, especially in relation to making money through blogging.

John Chow has recently released a FREE eBook in which he shares numerous methods on how he got from making $0 to over $10,000/month with blogging. Download it HERE.

Here are some of the main sections covered in this 59 page eBoook:

• My Recommended Money Makers
• Beginner's Blogging Tips
• Must Have WordPress Stuff
• Pumping out Content
• Monetize your Blog
• Google Optimization
• Promotion Ideas
• My Story

Link to John Chow's eBook:
http://www.johnchow.com/book/make-money-online.pdf

Labels: Blogging, Make Money

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• Ultimate Web Analytics Comparison Resources


• VisiStat vs. Google Analytics


• Future of SEM: What WILL and WILL NOT Matter


• Microsoft Selects WebTrends


• NEW! Enquiro Eye Tracking Study: Yahoo/MSN


• Omniture ActionSource: Advanced Flash Tracking


• Google's Brett Crosby at Web Analytics World


• How to setup a Podcast and Embed Audio


• Web Page Load Time


• Analytics: You can't afford NOT to track

If you're interested in getting a copy of an eBook containing the top posts send me an email: mjasra@gmail.com

Top Referring Sites (excluding Search Engines)

• Kaushik.net


• WebAnalyticsAssociation.org


• WebTrends.com


• Digg.com


• Bloglines.com


• Technorati.com


• iEntry.com


• TopRankBlog.com


• WebAnalyticsDemystified.com


• Reddit.com

Top Referring Keywords

• Manoj Jasra


• Omniture ActionSource


• Web Analytics


• ActionSource


• WebTrends


• StatCounter


• Web Analytics Comparison


• VisiStat


• Omniture Flash Tracking


• Web Analytics World


• Blog Promotion


• iPhone June


• MySpace Virus


• ClickDensity


• Google Update

Search Engine Referral Share

• Google - 94.45%


• Search - 2.11%


• MSN - 1.94%


• Yahoo - 0.92%


• AOL - 0.35%

Browser Usage

• FireFox - 47.00%


• IE - 46.08%


• Safari - 3.95%


• Opera - 1.79%


• Mozilla - 0.41%

Country Referral Share

• United States - 54.67%


• Canada - 8.75%


• UK - 7.04%


• India - 3.42%


• Australia - 2.61%


• Germany - 2.28%


• Netherlands - 2.18%


• France - 1.63%


• Belgium - 1.57%

Labels: Blogging, Industry News, Web Analytics

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