2007-06-07

Free cartoons

Well, let's show some free cartoons on our page...

Traffic

OK, we can measure traffic now, but the traffic is ZIPPO accordingly to Google Analytics. What should one do to attract people to read his or her content? Why should anyone even bother navigating to this page? Well, because it has a content they either searched for or where referred to by someone or something else!

Accordingly to after-Google models of Internet ranking the most important measure of your site's popularity is how many other web-sites reffer to it. People even make bombs to increase their ranking on search engines and attract customers searching for particular keywords.

Putting something interesting on your webpage will definitely get some attention to it with proper marketing. Write about your post in the forums you participate, try to digg it, post a video on Metacafe, YouTube, Daily Motion etc. that refers to your site, and definitely make sure to reffer to your page in your e-mail, forum and other signatures.

Often times you can get people directed to your website by simply letting some other website import your posts. On the Facebook, for example, you can set up automatic import of your posts as notes into your profile. As a result, all your friends will see in the news feeds that you wrote something new and if they like it, they may even share or forward it further.

Well, lets see how these simple ideas will work on this one...

2007-05-31

Tracking statistics

You can't possibly know whether your site is successful or not without knowing how to measure its success. How many people visited it today? Where were they mostly from? Who directed them to your website? Which pages were the most interesting to them? Did anyone leave a backlink to you somewhere?

To be able to answer all these questions you've got to embed a tool into your pages that would measure all that data. There are quite a few of them on the Internet and most of them won't charge you even a gulden for having this information at your hand.

The simplest to embed when you power Blogger for your site would be Google Analytics. Simply create an account with them, get a small code snippet, and then go to "Page elements" in your blogger's Template tab and add HTML/Script element that contains the above snippet. Your statistics will start counting that same moment.

2007-05-30

Site history

Not that it matters much, but after a couple of years people might start wondering how your incredibly cool page looked at the rise of its success. Well, there are people who take care of this without charging you a single penny. To make sure they archive your page as well, just visit the following url: http://pages.alexa.com/help/webmasters/index.html#crawl_site and feed their crawler with the url of your website.

If similarly to us you chose blogger to provide hosting for your content, then you should know by now one important thing about it: Google owns your blog and can shut it down without any notice should they feel a need for such a drastic measure (see item 10 of their Terms of Service). Having your site archived from time to time will let you get some sort of backup for you content. Besides archiving, you will get a ranking of your website by Alexa as well as will be able to track who is back-referencing your web site!

2007-05-29

E-mail address

Regardless of what you start on the Internet today, you will most probably need a valid e-mail address to get those freebies. Without looking too much we've chosen GMail as our e-mail provider just because they provide almost 3 GB of space for your correspondence, have the most reliable spam detector we've seen on the net and provide a POP3 access to your mailbox for lazy boms like ourselves who don't want to run 10 browsers to check 10 mailboxes they've got.

Well, as all spam freaks we wouldn't leave our e-mail address somewhere on the Internet where a bot can read it, so here we'll just mention that our name from now on is Poor Estman and we can be reached by the email address spelled as name without any spaces at gmail dot com.

Free time

Well, with the frequency of posts here, FREE TIME seems to be the most expensive resource once you want to get something for free. It's probably true regardless of whether you are trying to get something for free, but let's keep this in mind in the future as this absolutely no-cost home page can turn into the most expensive project one has to carry...