Statistics. Who automatically cringes? Read this ...

I was totally excited when Tammy asked me to write about my experience during the Back to School, Back to Blogging Challenge hosted by Kludgy Mom. When I sat down to think about what I learned from this challenge, I was overwhelmed, I didn’t know where to start – I learned so much! I decided to do a Best of Back to School, Back to Blogging Challenge and post the favorite five things I learned and found beneficial! This is #5.  Here we go……

 Statistics

I’m guilty of obsessing over my blog statistics. I would check out my Google Analytics each night and would get excited that I had three more visitors today than I did yesterday or that the average time people spent on my site was now 2 minutes, 26 seconds! Yes, that is exciting, but other than that, I didn’t know how to get the most out of my blogs statistics. That’s where the B2S/B2B came in!

Kludgy Mom introduced us to the StatBook StatBook. She gave us an excellent tutorial on how to bring all those worthless important information we pulled from our statistics into one spot. She walked us through the making of the book, and what information was important to include. Kludgy suggested many important statistics to include that I hadn’t thought of as significant until then. Now that my StatBook is complete, each month, I will enter the prior month’s stats and can start to look for trends in my blog!

• The Official B2S/B2B information about statistics can be found here HERE and here HERE!

This is the last guest post from Cori, she was a real life-saver. I hope you enjoyed it!

Guest post!!

http://www.kludgymom.com/As most of you know, I'm whirling away on completing my degree (less than 3 wks, woot!). So, Cori from Cori's big mouth has graciously agreed to be my guest poster for the week while I finish up some last minute school projects.  Here are some tidbits to help you get to know her:

• started a hairbow making business
• nanny for triplets
• going to college and currently taking American Sign Language
• Preemie Awareness Advocate
•  done a lot of traveling through caribbean cruises, even been through the panama canal
• successfully finished the B2SB2B challenge
• Love, Love, Love to scrapbook just wish I had more time to do it!

This fall we participated in an event sponsored by Gigi @ kludgymom.com called "Back to School, Back to Blogging" or #B2SB2B for you Twitter affecionados.  Cori is sharing her favorite gems of wisdom from that event with you. Today's gem, NETWORKING!  Enjoy!!  Here's Cori ... :)

#1: Networking

 

Networking. You either love it, hate it or are scared to death of it! I for one, L*O*V*E networking with others, but I know that others are completely overwhelmed by the whole concept!

 

Well Kludgy Mom made it easy and broke it down into three focus areas: Blog Networks, Comments, and Social Media – even better she broke it down into an easy to follow diagram! The best part is….she made three separate diagrams (TP here, pardon the interruption, I was unable to get the pics to post ): )depending on how many followers you have to determine where you should spend most of your time in the blogosphere! How awesome is that?!  

 

1. Blog Networks: Not only do you need to JOIN blog networks, but you need to be ACTIVE in the networks! Post questions in their forums. Respond to others. Participate in events. Visit the blogs of the day. I’m a currently a member of two Blog Networks, Blog Frog and Bloggers. I know there are tons more and I challenge you to find them and join!

2. Comments: I’m sure you’re like me and read blog after blog and enjoy it! But how often do you leave a comment? If you have something thoughtful or pertinent to say, take the extra minute to comment. Everyone loves comments, no matter if they are famous established bloggers or a newbie blogger - a comment is a comment!

 

3. Social Media: I use Twitter, Facebook and Stumble Upon on a daily basis as a way to promote and share my blog with the world! You can set-up self-publishing/auto-feeds for both sites. So as soon as you publish your blog post, it’ll post to Twitter and/or Facebook…how easy is that?!

•  Twitter: Kludgy Mom wrote an awesome eBook on Getting Over Your Fears of Twitter that has some great information on how to get the most for your blog out of Twitter!
• Facebook: Facebook is a great way to share your blog feeds with your friends and family! You can even take it a step further and set-up a Facebook Fan Page for your blog! Fan pages are great because you can share your blog feeds with fellow bloggers who aren’t on your personal Facebook page!
• Stumble Upon: See above!

 The Official B2S/B2B information about Networking can be found HERE. If you want more information for New Bloggers (less than 100 followers) click HERE]. If you want information for Growing Bloggers (100-300 followers) click HERE and if you want more information for Established Bloggers (300+ followers) click HERE.

 

Okay, I know that was a lot of information for one blog post!

 
If you want to check out the ENTIRE Back To School, Back To Blogging Challenge, you can check it out on Kludgy Mom's blog. If you are curious what I had to say about the challenge, you can check out my posts for the challenge HERE!

 

Happy Blogging Everyone!