I want to tell you about a blog tool that I have found invaluable for certain types of sites that need more content added to them or more readers and reader involvement. In a word, that is probably most websites and blogs!

Skribit is a widget whose code you simply paste into your blog, probably on the sidebar, that allows your readers to easily ask you questions and request that you write about a given topic.

The first thing that this widget will do combat writer’s block. Someone might ask you a question completely out of the blue that you never thought of addressing, or didn’t think there was any interest in. Imagine how easy it will be to write on a given specific subject if there is a real person on the other end asking, who cares enough about your opinion to post the question first place via Skribit.

The other benefit that you get as a blogger is helping to work up a rapport or dialogue with your readership, no matter how small. You can make the case that this is most valuable when you’re just starting, out which is why I would suggest that new bloggers definitely install this widget. Imagine how you will differentiate yourself in the eyes of any reader who asks the question, from all the other anonymous blogs out there. It’s easy to see that you encourage repeat visitors by doing this. Just having the tool on your sidebar gives a certain professionalism to your blog, and by the way Skribit is customizable.

I have found my readers to be very receptive to leaving questions right there on the home page with this blog tool. Put yourself in your readers’ place. If you have established yourself as an authority on a topic, they might be tired of doing Google searches to find an answer to a specific question that they have. The prospect of a real person addressing their specific point could be worth a lot to them, and certainly worth leaving a brief question to you involves minimal effort.

This plug-in is a win-win for website publishers and bloggers on one hand and their readers on the other. It’s an example of how incredibly easy the Internet makes the exchange of information between individuals, as opposed to always having to refer to a centralized repository like an encyclopedia in the old days, or even Wikipedia today.

Skribit can be added to various blogging platforms, certainly not just WordPress. It is also free, although to add additional blogs you have to ‘go pro’ and pay. It may very well still be worth it to install and test to see the response you get.

It is a blog tool that might just put you down the road to having an audience with whom you interact, much faster. Don’t forget that that interaction more than anything is what separates successful (even professional) bloggers from the millions of people out there who are finding it difficult to connect with an audience.

Analytics–What Is It Good For?

As a blog tool, Google Analytics isn’t exactly something that makes your blog run better or gives you an easier time of adding content every day, but most bloggers would agree that installing analytics provides you with vital information about your readers.

It is valuable to know where your readership is coming from before they visit your site, what other sites on the Internet linked to you and in turn sent visitors. It’s also very valuable to be able to analyze the search engine traffic that comes to your site e.g. the keywords that people typed into a search engine that brought them to you. Google analytics allows you to check in detail statistics regarding these things and a whole lot more.

Analytics Installation

Installation is very simple. Simply create an account and add as many of your sites as you’d like to watch. You must have write access to a site’s files in order to add the analytics code to the site. (You cannot install Google analytics on any site you are interested in) when you finish the sign-up process you will be given a code snippet that you simply copy paste into the header or footer file of your blog or website. Is easier than it sounds; if you need help finding the files in which to paste the code, it’s easy enough to find on the Internet.

How to Read Google Analytics

Once the code is installed, you have a wealth of information at your fingertips. From the dashboard you can choose a given time period, from a single day to any date range you specify, and immediately drill down to see a lot information on your readership for that period. Interesting and useful stats include: how many unique visitors you had, overall page views, pages per visit, and visitors’ average time on your site. A fascinating feature is the map overlay area, which tells you where your visitors came from geographically, sorted by country and with the ability to drill down to have a look by state or province, right down to the individual city from which your visitors came, from any country in the world! You can also quickly check out what the most popular pages on your blog or website are.

What To Do With Analytics Information

So what value does all of this Google analytics information have to a blogger? It can be used in many ways.

What if you found out that half of the visitors on your recipes blog came because they want to find out more about barbecue recipes or techniques? Your visitors are telling you what they’d like to read about, and it’s very possible that you will see a real jump in readership if you will give it to them on a more regular basis. Without Google analytics you may never have known how well-appreciated your blog posts on barbecues were. Comments are one way to judge a blog post’s popularity, but they are very imprecise way of doing so. Conversely, you may have imagined that the world needs more salad recipes and that that would be a big source of interest and traffic for you; it’s possible that you are wrong in this notion, and with your analytics data you could redirect your energies into articles that your visitors appreciate more, if you want to.

What if you started a blog on car repair, thinking that you can help people who are interested in the fixing up old cars and turning them into hot rods? Google Analytics might inform you that a high percentage of your traffic actually comes from India, where people might be using your high-quality information to turn junk cars into basic transportation. Knowing that your readers are less interested in hot rods and more interested in just getting engines running might affect the subject matter of your blog.

The “new visits” statistic has value. If, over time, you’re seeing the percentage of new visitors slowly decline, it means that more people are bookmarking your site to revisit later. (Assuming the overall amount of visitors is not declining of course!) Certainly this would be an encouragement to you. Seeing that the duration of the average visits your site is increasing would also be encouraging; Google Analytics tells you this too. “Pages per visit” is another interesting stat: generally having the number rise is a good thing, although some experts point out that having people visit one or two pages on your blog and then leaving might be a sign that they found exactly what they were looking for, then quickly left. Statistics are always open to interpretation, and Google Analytics information is no exception.

Analytics offers a ton of information about how your site is being used by visitors. Seeing that visits are (hopefully) increasing over time is only the tip of the iceberg. If you use an analogy of your blog being a retail store, analytics tells you a lot about the reasons that people came to shop, what precisely they were searching for, and what they found. If you are interested in increasing visitors to your site over time and enhancing their experience while on your site, you really need information like this.

One more thing: the Google Analytics blog tool is free. When you think about it it’s easy to see that whatever other motivations the company has, Google wants your sites to become more popular and useful, and this is a great tool for that.