With any blog that I own or operate there are just a few things I want to know about the people who come to visit.  There are many, many different items of statistical data that I could analyze about blog visitors, but for the most part it really boils down to just 3 questions:

• Who are you?
• What are you looking at?
• How did you get here?

That’s it.  That’s all I really want to know.  I think you’ll find that these 3 questions cover the most important areas of visitor tracking and they also provide a good ruler to measure how well your blog is doing.

Let me break down these questions and explain what they mean to me:

• Who are you? – When I ask this I’m not after a visitor’s name or what they do for a living.  I want to know if you are a new visitor, a returning visitor, a search engine spider, etc.  User agents, IP addresses and browser cookies do a pretty good job of separating this info out, and this info can then be broken down into their individual parts.
• What are you looking at? – When someone is browsing through a blog of mine, I am interested in knowing which post they are reading.  Tracking this data for enough time will tell me what posts are more valuable or relevant to what people want.
• How did you get here? – I am always interested in knowing how people found their way to my blog.  Did they run a search on Google?  Direct visit?  Click on a link at another site?  Did someone email a post? This kind of information is invaluable in determining where my blog is being mentioned and how well known it is.

These 3 questions tell me almost everything I want to know that can help me provide a better blog for my visitors.  If I know how many visitors, what they’re looking for and where they’re finding me, I can better prepare my blog to provide blog visitors with what they’re looking for.

If you look at the answers to these questions for a while you will probably start looking into another important area, and that is why your visitors are leaving your site.  Looking at exit pages and the duration of visits can also be vital information in determining the health of your blog.

What things do you want to know about your blog visitors?  What do you use to help keep track of this information?

There are many, many people who make money from their blog by offering to advertise for others on it.  Making money from advertising is the main form of revenue for bloggers, and a big reason why so many people rush into blogging in the first place.  But before you rush out to slap some advertising on your blog think about the pros and cons of hosting ads in the first place.

If you have been operating a business blog for a lengthy period of time and are not offering any form of advertising you may be questioning if it would be a good option for you.  I’m going to cut straight to the point and say that 99% of the time you should definitely NOT post advertisements on your blog.  Let me explain why.

Yes, when you place advertisements on your blog you will gain another source of revenue.  The three main ways you get paid from placing ads are by hosting them for a certain amount of time, by the impression count or by getting paid for every “click” they produce.  Many people are making have turned their blogs into a lucrative business through advertising, but that really shouldn’t be your goal in business blogging.

What happens when a visitor clicks on an ad on a blog?  They immediately exit your blog and are taken to another website.  This action is contrary to what your goal in business blogging is.  You don’t want people leaving your site to go to another one unless it is your main business site!  When you place 3rd party ads on your site you are actually promoting the idea that your visitors should go somewhere else.

Don’t send your visitors away!

When you set up a blog to help promote your business, you want that blog to help funnel traffic to your main site.  Your blog should be focused on your business and on topics related to it.  Most people will arrive to your blog from a search engine, so it is important to provide them with your relevant information that will ultimately (hopefully!) direct them to your main site.

Advertisements on your blog, unless they are for your main site, hinder this progress.  They distract from the message you are promoting and can cause the minds of your audience to wander.  It is best to keep your visitors focused on what you are offering and not on what someone else is offering.

Eventually, if your blog traffic grows to a significant amount, you may be tempted to offer 3rd party advertising.  Even if your ads are for non-competing sites I would still generally recommend to not give in to this temptation.  The extra revenue is nice, but the side effects of blog advertising are just too detrimental to why you started blogging for your business in the first place.

One of the benefits of business blogging is the SEO improvements it can bring to your main business site.  The  ways these benefits come about are diverse, but in order to use a blog to boost the traffic and ranking of other sites you have to be able to attract visitors to your blog first.  Targeting the keywords in your niche is one way to bring in search engine traffic.

There are 4 simple methods to optimize the content you publish on your blog for targeting keywords.  By combining all these techniques into your blog posting formula you will increase the likelihood of being found by search engine visitors for the keywords you are targeting.  Let’s run down the 5 ways you can target keywords with your blog:

1. Use keywords in the title of your posts – If you are wanting to target the keyword “XYZ Widgets” then include that keyword in the title of your post.  It goes without saying, but the words in the title of a blog post carry a lot of weight in how it is listed in the search engines.
2. Tag the post with your keyword – You should be tagging all of your posts.  Using a keyword specific tag on your post will give it a little more “oomph’ for the term that is being targeted.  Keep the tags related to your content though; it’s not a good idea to use tags that are not relevant to the article you published.
3. Include the keyword in your Category – You have an article about “XYZ Widgets” and you have used that keyword in the title of your post and you have also tagged it with “XYZ Widgets”.  How about having your article listed under the Category of “XYZ Widgets”?  Every little bit helps!
4. Meta description tags – Include your keywords in the meta tag description of your blog post.  Having a keyword specific description about your content is another little boost for the area you are targeting.

If you’re business blog is new, it will take some time before it begins to get good rankings from the search engines for the keywords or market you are targeting.  Given a little time along with effective optimization of your publishing techniques and you will eventually start to dominate the keywords you are after!