This year, I was asked to speak about the importance of web analytics platforms.  One of my sessions featured my Top 10 web analytics platforms that I believe everyone should know.

The Top 10 Web Analytics Platforms are in no particular order.  Also, it is important to note that I do not think that you should use all of them.  Instead, you should pick your favorites, and go with it.  But make sure you know a little about all of them.

#1 – Google Analytics

google.com/analytics

Shockingly obvious, yes.  However, the analytics beginner may not fully appreciate the power of this platform since it is ubiquitous to the industry.  This fall, we saw GA release realtime analytics (finally!).  Realtime analysis makes the platform more appealing to “newsroom” style publishers.

#2 – GetClicky

getclicky.com

Still my favorite all around analytics platform.  I’ve used it for years, and it has never let me down.  GetClicky has offered realtime analytics since virtually day one.  The platform has continued to evolve including rich extensions such as an app for iPhone and iPad.  For “newsroom” applications, they have released a big screen mode that basically takes over the full screen of your machine with realtime site traffic.  Also has a robust solution for advertising and marketing tracking with no-fuss reporting.  

#3 – Chartbeat

chartbeat.com

The undisputed leader in realtime traffic analytics.  Since its debut, Chartbeat showed the power of understanding how your content was being consumed at the very moment it is consumed.  With the release of Newsbeat (for newsrooms), Chartbeat positions itself squarely as the homepage of digital news directors everywhere.  No other platform will help you to make data driven changes to your group of lead stories like Chartbeat can.  A must for news, gossip, and “immediacy” focused content publishers.

#4 – Klout

klout.com

Today’s digital ninjas need to go beyond the data provided by their owned and operated domains.  Understanding you and your brands social influence is critical for successful digital professionals.  Klout will help you understand, track, and grow your digital influence in any number of categories.  Anyone with a Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, or Four Square account has a Klout Score.  At the time of this posting, mine is a healthy 48 (of 100). One of the most impressive social media products launched to date.

#5 – Quantcast

quantcast.com

In keeping with the natural evolution of digital data geeks everywhere, you want to know how your site ranks compared to its peers.  Quantcast acts as one of the Internet’s premier “freemium” ratings and ranking services.  All sites with statistically significant traffic find their way into the Quantcast database.  Proactive webmasters can place a free Quantcast script on their site to allow direct measurement.  In addition to tracking and publicly reporting your site’s overall reach, Quantcast breaks your traffic down demographically and geographically.  Publishers can quickly and easily see what mix of gender, race, incomes, and education levels visit their sites.  And so can potential advertisers.

#6 – Compete

Compete.com

At its core, Compete is similar to Quantcast in its tracking and audience aggregation methodology.  However, it focuses more on being a resource for advertisers to looking to target specific audiences with their ads.  Compete offers a suite of advertising planning tools to its customers that help evaluate overall campaign efficiency.  The focus is no surprise since it is owned by Kantar Media, the data geek nerve center for worldwide advertising conglomerate WPP.  Both Quantcast and Compete are important reference points for publishers because these are the tools that your advertisers (aka the ones keeping the lights on) use to evaluate your site.

#7 – Sitemeter

Sitemeter.com

Ahhh Sitemeter.  Ohh how those of us that have been in the industry since the dawn of blogging love you.  You were there for us when there was nothing else [free] available.  Sitemeter is one of the older free analytics services.  It offers a standard but thorough analytics dashboard that provides everything the startup publisher would ever need.  They also aggregate and rank publishers that use the service.  Your Sitemeter ranking used to be something that bloggers bragged about.  Those were the days…

#8 – Sprout Social

sproutsocial.com

As mentioned earlier, social media now finds its home in the wheelhouse of every serious publisher.  When publishing content, you must now understand how to market it in the social graph, and analyze what comes back.  In addition to providing a truly comprehensive suite of social publishing tools, Sprout Social also analyzes every aspect of every tweet and status update.  Keep track of every new follower, every retweet, and Facebook share with Sprout.  You’ll quickly be able to track what content you publish gets shared the most.  Before long, you’ll be a viral publishing machine.

#9 – SEO Moz

SEOMoz.org

Arguably the best one-stop-shop for every SEO tool you could ever need.  In addition to understanding visitor site traffic and social media, great publishers understand how the Google overlords view their content.  Publishing great content is the most important thing you will ever do in this game.  Sadly, that does not always bring the eyeballs.  SEO Moz will give you actionable advice on how to structure your site overall as well as analyze the Google-mojo of every content post.

#10 – comScore

comscore.com

It is with mixed emotions that we place comScore on this list.  For most publishers, comScore will never factor into their day-to-day activities directly.  However, it will be the bane of your career every time your advertising sales managers come down to your office to discuss this month’s comScore ranking.  comScore is the default advertising rating service that the vast majority of online marketers utilize.  With billions of dollars being spent advertising online, the industry needs a common set of benchmark evaluations.  comScore will rank your site’s traffic, reach, page views, and demographic makeup in order to provide a rating”.  Your site’s comScore profile will often mean the difference between gaining or losing advertisers.  Again, it will not factor into the day-to-day activities of publishing your content.  However, a positive comScore story can mean serious revenue wins.

That’s not all…

There are dozens of other great services that did not make this list.  By no means would I consider this list to mean anything other a grouping of services I have grown to respect, and in some cases, cannot live without.

If you feel I’ve made an egregious mistake by leaving a certain platform off of this list, please post it in the comments below.  Let’s start a discussion!

In this post I am going to lay out a blueprint for you that you can follow step-by-step and then in later posts I will give you more details on how to actually set up each of these methods to maximize their impact on your traffic stats.

1. Do the preparation steps in the previous blog post.
2. Write five articles related to your niche – this is not as hard as it seems – you can simply rewrite your blog posts to create unique articles.
3. Use Camtasia Free software and PowerPoint presentation slides to create videos out of your article content – don’t mind being in front of the camera?  Then use that, but you want to create five videos based on your five articles and you will need five PowerPoint presentation slide shows for traffic generation as well.
4. Create an audio file of all five of your articles.  If your article content is quite short just make one audio file including the information in all five articles.

Okay so at this point you will have five articles, five videos, five PowerPoint presentation slide shows, and at least one audio file.  All of these files will contain backlinks to your site and if you can include a call to action (without sounding spammy) in the content as well all the better.  Now you have to get these out on the net.

The Articles

Your articles are going to provide a hub for the rest of your traffic efforts.  Firstly you want to submit them to Ezinearticles.com.  Unless you are a premium member this is going to take a few days for the articles to be approved.  You are also going to submit your articles to the following sites:

• Goarticles.com
• SubmitYourArticles.com
• ArticleDashboard.com
• Freenichetopics.com

But wait until your articles have been approved on Ezinearticles.com first – EZA does not like duplicate content.  Don’t forget to ping your article links (the actual link of the page your article is on) as well as Stumble it, Twitter it and put the link up on Facebook.

Next you want to find some graphics to go with your article content and then head over to Squidoo.com and set up five lenses using your article content and the pictures you have collected.  Each article will make an individual lens.  If you have not made a Squidoo Lens before then check out the help tutorials they have on their site which are very good or courses by people like Tiffany Dow or the PotPieGirl.  Again once you have your lenses finished then ping them and use your social media links to put the word out about them.

Well that should be enough to keep you going for the moment.  In the next post I will explain more things you can do with your articles and also where to post the other content that I had you create.

Setting the Groundwork

Getting prepared for traffic to your site is something that you should be thinking off from the moment you install WordPress on your new domain.  Before you start generating traffic you want to make sure that you have installed all of the plug-ins outlined in our previous post here [Link to 5 Essential Plug-ins You Blog Must have].  To keep Google happy your site will need to have a Privacy Policy page, a Terms and Conditions Page and a Contact page at the very least.  You should also make sure that you have a minimum of three blog posts on your blog, with more scheduled or planned before you put this traffic plan into place.  Ideally you should aim for one new blog post for your blog daily for about a month, and then at least three times a week thereafter so that your blog always has good fresh content coming in.

Setting Up Backlinks

If you are not familiar with SEO then it is unlikely that you have come across the term “Backlinks” before but these are a vital part of your blogging success.  In a nutshell backlinks are links on other sites that point back to your blog, or a specific blog post.  The more backlinks your blog has the more valuable it is considered by Google and other search engines.  So you need to set up a system to start generating backlinks as quickly as you can.

Warning: There are a lot of companies online that claim they can get you hundreds or even thousands of backlinks for the price of a cup of coffee – Do not use these methods.  They are considered spam and can get your blog banned from Google permanently if you use these “Black Hat” methods.

Your pinging will already be creating backlinks for you but you can go a lot further with this.   Just some of the methods you can use include

• Putting articles on article directory sites like Ezinearticles and GoArticles
• Putting up videos on YouTube and other video sites (TubeMogul is good for this)
• Creating audio files and placing them on sites like iTunes
• Blog commenting on other blogs in your niche
• Forum posting on relevant forums in your niche
• Posting an ebook of your content on free ebook sites like Free-ebooks.net
• Setting up related pages on Squidoo.com and HubPages
• RSS feeds
• Social Media sites like Twitter, Facebook and StumbleUpon

Now before you go thinking that this could be a lot of work, remember that you can outsource a lot of these tasks and as we will show you in the next blog post – a lot of these ideas come from recycling and repackaging content you have already created.  See you on the next post.

Read Part Two

To utilize this function in your WP blog you need to go to “Settings” in your admin panel and click on “Writing” in the drop down menu that comes up.

This will bring you up a page like the one above.  You need to scroll down this page until you find…

You won’t have anything in this block when you install your new blog – you have to find a ping list to copy and paste into it.  To help you here are ten you can include by simply copying the links below and pasting them into that box:

Make sure that when you paste them into this box that there is only one link per line – you don’t have to put commas after them.

Now just click save and then every time you update or create a page or blog post all of the sites listed in your ping list will be notified.   Subscribers to those sites, who are interested in your particular area of expertise will be notified automatically about your new content and before long you will have plenty of new people coming along to your site, to see what you have to say.

To promote his site, he got dressed up in one of Shoe’s t-shirts and had friends fire some live rounds at him point blank.

Naturally, Shoe had to post that on his site.  Honestly, who wouldn’t post a video of a guy taking a dozen paintballs to the chest at pointblank range just to get your attention.  Go check out the video on Shoe’s site.

If you’ve ever tried to get your site listed in Best of the Web, you know it requires a bit of effort and often a peice of change.

Well, BOTW just launched a local version of their directory, called BOTW Local.  The basic listing is free, so you might as well sign up for it.

It allows searchers to locate businesses based on geography.  So if you offer a local product or service, this is the answer to the broader national directory.

Oh, and there’s always BOTW Blogs too.  But that will run you $50 once the 60 day trial is up.

So sign up today…can’t hurt.

I had seen it in action before on the front end of a different website, but didn’t know that was what I was seeing.

Basically, the idea is to plop a special line of text at the top of your blog post when a user comes to your site through Digg, Stumble, etc.  The plugin knows when people came to your site from one of the social voting sites, and it knows which one.  It then, for example, will remind the Digg user to digg your post.

However, users that just browse your site the good old fashioned way won’t see anything.

The idea is to give the reader just a little reminder to give you a vote.  As a result, you should get more social votes.

So, I’m going to test it on a few other sites and see how it goes.

Pop in your blog URL and the site will instantly crawl and score your site on a variety of metrics.  Some of them include meta tags, linkbacks, content evaluation, page rank, and a whole lot more.

It can take a few minutes for the system to process your site, so be patient.  You can then read through all the details of your site’s score.

And it’s free!

What’s your site’s score?

All you have to do is search for your stuff and see if it shows up right? Well that would probably take all day. So here’s how you get there a little faster. Let’s use iCastLimited.com as the example.

Log onto Google. In the search field, do each of these searches individually.

site:icastlimited.com
link:icastlimited.com
cache:icastlimited.com
info:icastlimited.com
related:icastlimited.com

What does each search mean?

First, when you do the search, make sure to have the qualifier in before your domain. So your search should look like site:YOURWEBSITE.com. Note the “site:” part. There is no space between the “:” and your URL.

site: Will pull all of the pages that Google has listed for you in their system. All the pages will be pages from your site.

link: Will pull a list of all the sites/pages from other websites that link to you. Especially handy.

cache: A snaphot of the last time Google crawled your site.

info: See what info Google has registered for your site.

related: Pulls up sites that have similar content to you. Check out the competition.

The theory is that adding these buttons will encourage people to bookmark and share your post with others if they think it is especially noteworthy.  Great concecept in theory.

In reality, the clicks on these buttons are fairly low.  However, every little bit of incremental traffic generated from them helps, right?  So why not.  Plus, you never know if a whale will bookmark you and bring a ton of traffic.

Anyway, the last thing you want to do is litter the bottom of your site with 100 little bookmark chicklets.  It looks bad and makes your site load slower.  So what’s the alternative?  ShareThis

ShareThis is a bookmarking tool for your blog or website that also does a simple “Email This to a Friend” function.

Right out of the box, it comes with all the most popular social networking sites and bookmarking sites.  In about 5 minutes, you can have this configured and launched on your blog.  It also comes with a handy little plugin for WordPress that makes the implementation slightly easier.  However, you don’t need the plugin portion if you are compfortable with it on your own.

You are left with a clean, small button on the bottom of your posts that says ShareThis with a little icon.  That’s it.  Nice and clean.  When clicked, it pops open to reveal your sharing options.

For you as the site owner, you can track the usage of these networking tools through the ShareThis website.  That way, you can see if people are actually using it!