My 5 Favorite, but Often Ignored, Analytics Features

This post was written by the Web Marketing Ninja—a professional online marketer for a major web brand, who’s sharing his tips undercover here at ProBlogger. Curious? So are we!

The wonderful thing about working online is that our work is just so measurable.

In just about every other industry, a lot of decisions are based on sample data, or assumptions, or just on gut feel. But online, we can measure just about everything for 95%+ of our visitors—yay for us!

In our world of pretty graphs and statistics, we have are a stack of options to ensure we’ve got our eyes on the numbers. But when it comes to bang for buck (i.e. lots of value for no outlay) there really is no equal, in my opinion, to Google Analytics—and it just keeps getting better.

I’m sure a lot of you are already feeling the Google love with Analytics—and if you’re an addict like me, you’re using it on a daily basis. So I thought I’d share my five favorite, but often ignored, features of Google Analytics.

1. Custom Reports

There are so many levels, layers, and measures in the Google Analytics interface that I often used to waste time attempting to find my first stop in the system: reports.

Custom Reports changed that. Not only does this feature allow for a myriad of different perspectives and data, but you can also save each report and head back to it at a moment’s notice. This video is a good starting point to understanding how to make the most of custom reports.

2. Scheduled Reports

Actually remembering to jump into Analytics to make sure you’re across everything can be a challenge. Scheduled Reports make the job much easier.

You’ll probably have certain reports you’ll look at more often than others. If you click on the little email icon on the top-right of a report, you’ll be able to set up a schedule so that that report’s delivered to you via the inbox.

This is a great way to ensure that your busy schedule is not getting in the way of you knowing what’s happening on your site.

3. Navigational Summary

In December I wrote about the concept of sales funnels, and a lot of you asked how on Earth you can manage to measure all those steps. Well, the Navigational Summary report will get you started.

It covers the essential details for each page view, including where the user came from (another page, external site), and then where they went to (exit, another page)—plus everything in between. This is a key report to start understanding browsing behaviors on your critical pages. You can access the navigational summary through the Content section. I tend to use the Content Drilldown report to find the specific pages I’m after, then click the Navigational Summary for their specific metrics.

4. eCommerce and the $ Index

When you set up ecommerce tracking in Google Analytics, you open up a whole new world of insight. It’s a feature that’s only useful for those selling online, but it’s scarily accurate and amazingly insightful.

Goals Overview

With eCommerce set up, not only can you see reports on the products you’re selling, and how much money you’re earning, but you can also start to track them back to other pages in your site. You might find that particular types of blog post generate more revenue per page view—and that’s where the $ Index kicks in.

With this metric you’ll know the average income per visit to each page or collection of pages on your site. Unfortunately setting this up is not straightforward, and you might need a little help. There’s a good article on the Analytics blog that will help get you moving. Sorry I can’t show a good screen shot of this—the information was too sensitive for the other sites I have access to.

5. Goals and Funnels

Almost all websites have some sort of desired visitor action. It might be to buy something, to fill out a contact form, to download a sample, or even just look at a bunch of other pages. Setting up goals in Google allows you to track these goals like a fox. You get insight into the overall performance of your site, but you can also track back every step of the way.

Unfortunately, like eCommerce, this feature can be a little tricky to set up and is something you might wish to get help with. I won’t go into too much detail on how to do this—it’s all covered on the Analytics blog.

Warning: Analytics is Like Quicksand

I often tell people that Google Analytics is a little like quick sand. Once you make that first step, it starts to really suck you in, and a short time later you’re stuck for good. More time passes and all of a sudden your head goes under—everything goes dark and you have no idea where you are.

It’s at that point that too many people go back to assumptions and guesswork, murmuring something about leaving “all that statistics guff” to the eggheads. If you’ve fallen into the Analytics quicksand, my recommendation is to keep things simple. Identify ten key metrics you want to measure, create a report or set of reports that deliver you those metrics, and review them over time. Once you’re comfortable, move a little deeper.

The more you understand about your business, the better-informed decisions you can make—and it’s the decisions that will make or break your business, not the numbers.

As I mentioned, Google Analytics in my favorite stats package, but I’d love to hear about any other stats packages you’re using and how you’re finding them in the comments. Or perhaps you can highlight your favorite functions of Googe Analytics that I’ve not covered…

Stay tuned from most posts by the secretive Web Marketing Ninja—a professional online marketer for a major web brand, who’s sharing his tips undercover here at ProBlogger.

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Three Excellent Ways to Get Sued as a Blogger

If you run a business online, or even just a blog, you are opening up yourself to a world of potential lawsuits. Everything on the internet isn’t free to grab and do what you like  with.  What you say or post on your web site or blog can easily land you with a unfriendly letter from an attorney, or have a lawsuit coming your way. Here are some of the top ways bloggers may find themselves in trouble when posting content on their sites.

1.) Image and Photo Copyrights

Looking for a great image for your new blog post? Heading over to Google and doing an image search and grabbing/posting any images you like to your blog isn’t a great idea. Just like any other product or created work, images and photography take time to create and also have copyrights and costs. Instead of jeopardizing your blog and getting sued, spend a few dollars on royalty free stock images at sites like Fotolia and iStockPhoto. There are also a ton of free icon and image web sites that won’t cost you any money at all.

2.) Auto Blog Posting

Over the past few years, auto blog posting has become increasingly popular. In short, auto blog posting is setting up a blog and having content taken from other web sites and blogs, then posted on your site automatically. While this may be acceptable if you are working with some article directories and shopping sites that allow this, you may be safe. However, if your auto blog starts grabbing copyrighted material, you can easily see fines of $100,000+ per article taken and posted without information.

3.) Posting False, Misleading or Personal Information

No one likes to have their private and personal information spread around the internet, let alone find misleading or false information about the ways companies do business. From celebrity web sites to coupon web sites, individuals and companies who are finding information that is personal, false or harmful are taking action. Yes, we do all have the freedom of speech, but at the same time, everyone has the right to sue over anything they like, so be careful what you write about.

As a whole, the internet and blogging is still in infancy and new laws are being created all the time. If individuals / lawyers think they can make a quick buck taking action against web site, be sure it will happen. Before posting your next blog content, make sure you are covered and that your content doesn’t fall into any of these area. For more information and ways to avoid getting sued as a blogger, check out this article from Jonathan at BloggingTips.com.

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Secrets to Making Money Online

I recently had a conversation with a friend who has just started out with making money from blogging. He had been struggling to get over the initial hump of getting things going and wanted to pick my brain on the “secrets” of how to do it.

Of course I struggled to answer at first—there’s simply not a simple equation on how to blog that will guarantee results—however, I did put together some thoughts for him that he found helpful. In this video, I summarize what I said.

While it’s fairly general in nature, I hope it’s helpful as we enter into a new year.

Secrets to Making Money Online Transcription

I had a conversation earlier today with a new friend who’s just started to blog. He’s been going for a couple of months now, and he’s a little bit frustrated. He’s hit a couple of brick walls, and he wanted to sit down and just sort of pick my brain on the secrets to making money from blogging and making money on the Internet.

And, look, it’s question I get asked a lot—particularly in interviews. You know, “What’s your number one secret to making money online?” And I always struggle to answer it, because ultimately there is no secret and there’s no one way to do this. You can look at the variety of Internet marketers and see a whole heap of different methods to do it and approaches to do it.

But I began to share with this friend some of the things I guess that I’ve learned, particularly in the last year or two, about making money online. And I asked him for his notes, because he was writing everything down, so that I could share it in a video. And this is kind of the stuff that I said to him.

Number one, I talked about trying to do something online that you really love. Choose an area, a topic, a niche, an industry, that you have some resonance with, some appreciation for, some passion for. There’s a whole heap of reasons for doing this. One, it’s much easier to stick with it for the long term. Two, those who read what you produce and come across you will feel much more drawn to you if you are passionate about it yourself. And I just personally find it much easier to make money from something that I actually have a genuine interest in, because I’m able to produce products and blog posts and content that connects with people, because I know what turns those people on, and I know what will get them reading. I know what will get them purchasing.

So if you have an interest, if you have a passion, then try to center what you do online around that. That doesn’t mean you can’t make money from something you’re not interested in or that you don’t like; it’s just a lot easier to do it that way.

The second thing I’d say—and I repeat this over and over again on ProBlogger, but I think it just needs to be said—is be as useful as you possibly can. One of my most recent videos on ProBlogger was about my son telling me, “Tell the world something important.” And really, that is it. That is what it’s all about for me.

Again, you can make money online by doing things that aren’t useful, that aren’t important, that aren’t really enhancing people’s lives, by ripping people off, but it’s much more satisfying if you’re doing something that is actually useful, and it’s much more sustainable in the long term if you want to build a business, rather than just make a quick buck, if you actually make connections with people and be useful to them.

The third thing I said was that you need to be confident. Once you’ve chosen something to produce and to focus in on, and once you are starting to be useful, it’s much easier to be confident—but you still need to work on that confidence. Many people get online, and they feel that they’re not able to sell themselves, they’re not able to sell the things that they do. And, look, that’s difficult to do, but you need to learn how to do that.

You need to approach this confidently. You need to make offers confidently. You need to approach other potential partners confidently. If you are nervously doing those things all the time, people will sense that.

Now, that doesn’t mean you have to be an extrovert and you need to hype things up. A quiet confidence will go a long way for you. So work on that aspect of things. Push yourself forward, if you aren’t one of those confident people. Get people around you to encourage you in that as well. So be as confident as you can.

The other thing I talked about with my friend today was diversifying what you do, and not just focusing upon one income stream. Now, this is a bit of a tricky one, because if you diversify too much you can end up not really doing anything very well. But what I’ve tried to do over the last eight or nine years now is diversify on a number of fronts.

One, diversify the topics that I write about. Now, I have four different main blogs that I produce content for, four different interests for me, and by doing that I’m diversifying, and if one doesn’t go so well I’ve got the three others to back it up.

But I’m also trying to diversify the income streams. And you’ll have seen, I’ve produced a breakdown of my income streams over the last couple of months. And you’ll see in that eight or nine different areas of income. I’m not just relying upon ad networks like AdSense, or I’m not just relying upon my own eBooks. I’m trying to build in different income streams so that if one falls over, or if one takes a little while to take off, there are other things there to supplement that income.

In the early days of my own blogging and making money online, I diversified by having a real job as well. When I first started I had three jobs, so I had this diversification, I guess, of the income streams, and that helped me to be much more sustainable in the long term.

Speaking of long term, the number five thing that I’d say is that you really need to take a long-term view of this. You can make money fast on the Internet, but it generally comes after years of building foundations. A number of times, I feel like I’ve made a lot of money really fast on the Internet, but as I look back on it there’s usually been two or three years of work, of building relationships with readers and producing content for free, that have led to these bursts of income. And so you do need to take a long-term view of things.

You need to see it as an investment. A lot of the times, when you make investments, you don’t get a return on those investments for a number of years, and the same is true on the Internet. See the time, the energy, and perhaps even some money that you’ve put into these things as an investment that hopefully, one day, will pay off.

The last thing I guess I said to my friend was that you really need to treat it as a business rather than just an event. Making money online … again, it can happen as an event, it can be these moments where you make money, but most online entrepreneurs actually see it as a business. It’s not just a one-off thing where they make money, and then they go and try something else. What I’ve tried to do is to build a business that has this diversity of income, but is also growing over time. As you release a new product, you need to think about ways of driving traffic back to that product over time. As you do affiliate marketing, you need to build systems that will continue to promote things to your readers using, say, an autoresponder.

You need to think a bit strategically, I guess is what I’m trying to say. A lot of people get online, and they produce content, and they think that it will make money by just getting readers. You need to think strategically about how you’re actually going to monetize it. So you need to think about it as a business, you need to think about it strategically, and probably one of the main things for me in terms of building a business rather than just having a job online is to actually build products into what you do. Don’t just rely upon advertising revenue, or marketing other people’s products. Whatever you do, try and work towards having some products that you can sell of your own, and then develop systems around those products to sell them, not just when you launch them, but in an ongoing way.

They’re some of the secrets of making money online that I guess I’ve been thinking about, particularly over the last year or two. There’s a whole heap more of course, but I’d love to hear some of your secrets to making money online. You can leave them in the comments below this video, and I’d love to connect with you there.

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My Dad Held the Keys to an Untapped Niche Market

When entrepreneurs start online they usually blog about what they know. For me, that was study skills. It is not the sexiest thing to talk about, and actually a hard niche market to crack, but it my first website and has led to some paid blogging jobs in education.

But I was making no money and very few students are interested in commenting on such a site.

So I had a beer with a ProBlogger!

Have you ever seen a tweet from Darren that says “Come over to Ustream andlet’s have a chat”? Well I did and one comment really captured my attention. I’m paraphrasing, but Darren was asked whether he thought he could
start a successful blog in any niche market. He thought it was an interesting experiment and believed it could be done.

Enter: My Dad!

My dad owned supermarkets. And now he owns cutting horses. Cutting is an amazing horse competition that originated in the US. Here is a short video that explains cutting better than I can (there is no blood involved, just a horse and a rider
trying to keep a cow away from a heard).

Dad had spent the last nine months listening to me banging on about blogging and social media, connecting through stories, and making money online.

So one day we sat down and he showed me some very popular websites for people involved in the sport of cutting. And I was shocked! They were truly ugly flash sites, plastered with awful advertisements and outdated content.

But they were all making money.

The Site is Born

Cutting Horse Link is the newest cutting horse website online, created by yours truly and her dad. Dad writes the posts, and I edit them. Dad turns up to cutting horse shows on the weekends and hands out our flyers. I hustle online, interact through horse forums, and connect via Facebook.

And together we have created a successful online business. Yes, business! In four months we already have a loyal following of members who are approaching us and asking for us to promote them. We have major advertisers and are paying our first writer.

We’re making money quicker than we expected.

How Good Bloggers Stand out in the Crowd

I believe good bloggers can be successful in any niche market. Here’s why.

Our sites will stand out in the crowd

Blog-based sites look different from others. And that is good. It was obvious as soon as a cutting horse fan clicked on our site that we had something different. Cutting Horse Link focused on personal stories, while the other sites put the Sales Barn right out in front.

We know stories are more important than sales

Our site also speaks differently than our competitors’ do. We are more personal in our stories. We link to other people (including our competitors). I post photos of professional horse riders playing tennis in their spurs. I have a section called “Gooseneck Gossip” and we shoot videos of ourselves and post audio interviews from key industry personalities.

We understand wait time

Bloggers know that community takes time to develop. Within this niche market the most common question I have been asked is “What is in it for me?” Because I wasn’t selling anything, the community didn’t trust the site. But
that was okay. I knew that if I kept to our writing schedule that people would come to the site. Surprisingly, they came very quickly.

We know connections are the key

Straight up, dad and I knew we couldn’t do it all by ourselves. So we developed connections with various groups in cutting—youth, parents, trainers, riders, photographers, and even other websites. We took the time to promote them and then asked if they would do the same. This is really important if you are considered an outsider in the niche market. Connections matter. We were able to convince a pro trainer and one of the largest horse breeders to be interviewed by us, which led to more traffic—and more trust.

We nail the technical stuff

From the beginning, I had an editorial schedule for the blog. I made sure I had a newsletter from Day 1. And I took the time to make sure that the posts and titles were SEO-friendly. I am surprised at how much traffic we get just from search engines. If I didn’t know SEO strategies, we would certainly be struggling.

Don’t forget the first rule of blogging

If you are going to attempt to write a blog in a niche market you are unfamiliar with, you mustn’t forget the most important rule: content is king! So you need a partner, someone who knows the audience. There is absolutely no way I could do this site without my father. He knows our audience, and knows what stories will interest them. He can pick the trends before they happen and he knows the correct language to use.

My role in the partnership is more as editor or online strategist. I do the technical stuff and model strategies from other successful online businesses.

And together we are having so much fun. Dad now walks around quoting Crush It, and is a big hit on Facebook. Sure, he doesn’t know how to use WordPress and I can’t get him to consider tweeting yet. But he writes great stories and understands that online connections are just the same as those we make in real life.

So next time you are at a family dinner don’t hide in front of the TV or spend the whole time tweeting on your iPhone. Sit and listen to your aunt as she describes her new patchwork quilt or ask your grandfather about his model train collection. You might just find an untapped online business gold mine!

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How Cancer Changed My Blog

This post is by Karl Staib of Work Happy Now.

I was recently diagnosed with testicular cancer. Yes, the dreaded c word. It’s probably not what you are thinking. I don’t look at this health issue as an anchor. I look at this as an opportunity for growth.

I’ve been blogging for over three years. Each year I’ve gone through unique pains.

The pain of no one reading my blog eventually transformed to Forbes.com contacting me and naming my blog one of the top 100 blogs for women. It’s been an amazing blogging journey.

I want to share how a major illness has shifted and improved my blog. It has been a journey that has bruised my ego, but it has also lifted me to new heights.

Blogging is not easy, every blogger will tell you that, especially when also dealing with personal issues. There are so many factors that can derail your progress if you don’t stay focused.

Put the important stuff first

You know that you need to put the important stuff first, but how do you figure out what’s important and what’s not?

You have to see where your present wins are coming from and figure out how to expand on them. I teach people to leverage their superpowers and bloggers are no different. You have your strengths, passions, and the work that puts you in the zone. All of these actions need to be pushed to the front.

Too many people say to focus on your strengths and you’ll be successful. That’s not true. You may be a great writer, but if you write about the wrong subject you are never going to thrive. You must take a holistic approach to your work. If you are crazy about music, but can’t seem to string your notes together then you won’t thrive either. It’s all about creating synergy between your passions, strengths, and focus. All three must be present for your action to be a superpower.

When you do work that gets you excited every day, it’s easier to keep your energy level high and stay productive. You have to have a system. Everybody’s system is different. Leo loves to write in the morning. Darren loves to do work in batches. The most important thing is that they put their passions at the top of the list and so should you.

Don’t be afraid to reach out

Blogs are dependent upon people not just following your posts, but also sharing your blog with others. That means you have to find the people who are willing to share your stuff with their friends. This is hard and I struggled with this concept in the first couple of years.

Since my cancer diagnosis, I’ve been more willing to put myself out there to be found by someone like you. I don’t care if I get rejected. The fear is just a little less intense.

Because the fear is less intense, I’m more willing to market my coaching or my brand.

You have to realize that you only have a finite number of days on this earth. If you want your blog to get to the next level you have to find people who will tell their friends about it. You have to connect with people in your niche and find a way to encourage other people’s audience to visit your blog on a regular basis. I know you know this, but it’s a lot harder than it looks. You have to test out a lot of different blogs until you find one that connects with your style.

Stop letting your frustration dictate your choices

I could have given up on my blog a long time ago. I have a full-time job, a wife, a kid, and not much time. My cancer would have been a perfect excuse to give up. Believe me, there have been times when I really wanted to do just that.

I didn’t give up because I know that I’m on a mission to help people leverage their superpowers. I want to help people change the world. It’s why I love working with bloggers. They are the type of people that are creative and passionate. They aren’t always sure how to get to point b, but they really do want to get there.

Your frustrations can take over if you let them, and they’ll wreck your happiness and relationships. You constantly have to be working with your emotions and using them to fuel your actions. Don’t not let them hold you back.

You can deal with your frustrations by taking time to process your emotions. I like to do a ten-minute meditation every morning and every night. It helps me set up my day and process my feelings each night. This mental exfoliating process is what keeps me balanced.

You may not like meditation, but you need to take time to process your emotions every single day. When you create this habit, you’ll improve your productivity and creativity. I promise.

Use a day each week to rest

As a blogger you have access to your work wherever you go. You can write a blog in any country, check your Facebook and Twitter account in any coffee shop, and build more connections at every comment on your friends’ blogs.

I’ve seen too many bloggers burn out because they go non-stop for too long and don’t enjoy the process. Blogging is a skill that takes time to develop, especially in this overcrowded age.

You have to take time to relax.

After discovering I had cancer and having it removed, I took a short time off from blogging. After a few days I quickly got back to it, but realized that I can’t go seven days a week any longer. I should never have been going seven days a week. I needed more time to relax and enjoy my family and life.

I’ve been blogging, networking and planning six days a week and I feel so much better. Sundays are no longer for blogging; whatever I don’t get done Monday through Saturday can wait until the following Monday. The best part about this new routine is that I get just as much done. I’m a little more focused, and I make sure that I get everything done by Saturday night.

You have to find time to relax that brain of yours. There is nothing wrong with posting seven times a week, but if you are constantly checking your stats, email, and whatever else you do all the time then you are missing out on life. You have to be willing to relax and let your mind recharge.

No pity

I’m not writing this post to gain your pity. I’m here to tell you that we have a short amount of time on this earth no matter how you look at it.

Bloggers are one of the luckiest groups of people on the internet. They have the superpower of communication. You can write, podcast, or video cast coherently. That’s a beautiful talent that you must optimize. You are changing people’s lives for the better. It’s up to you to find a way to take your setbacks and make you smarter, stronger and more widely read.

Have you ever been sick or had a family member become sick and had to adjust your blogging work load? What did you do and how did it change your blog?

Karl Staib is a career coach who helps people leverage their superpowers! If you enjoyed this article, you may want to check him out on or join his free 10 Part eCourse to a Happier and More Successful You.

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Share and Tweet Your Emotions with Smood.it

Tweet

There’s a new microblogging platform in town and it’s called Smood.it. On the site you can share your smood with the world; the word smood is “a syneresis of two words: smile and mood.” Smood.it calls itself a “micro(emo)blogging” services since it’s more focused on letting you share your emotions rather than a simple status message.

Smood.it offers all of the basic features like a profile, the ability to invite and search for friends as well as a timeline view that showcases the smoods of those you follow. In addition you can keep up with your weekly mood (that is if you use the site consistently).

There are two simple steps to sharing your smood:

1. Pick one of six emoticons that describes your mood. The choices are: joy, surprise, love, anger, fear and sadness.

2. Tag your mood with words that describe why you’re feeling that way; you can also use URLs here. Previous used tags from the community will appear below the text box as you type.

Once your done, your smood will appear as picture below, with the emoticon and tags. Clicking on each tag will, as expected, take you to a page where you can see others who have used the same tag.

Connect Your Twitter Account

Smood is tightly integrated with Twitter. When you first sign up, you have the option of signing up via Twitter OAuth. Be aware that by default, your smoods will be set to auto-post to Twitter. You can, however, turn this off under settings. You can also customize how your tweet will look when it posts, which is a nice addition that not many sites offer.

Alternately and also in addition, you can have your tweets post as smoods to Smood.it. This is also something that is set by default, but can be changed under settings. It seems as though Smood.it scans your tweets, gets a feel for the mood of them and then automatically sets one of the six emoticon for them. As for that tags, it uses the URL in your tweet (if one is included), the users mentioned (if you @mention anyone) and hashtags that you may have used.

I do like being able to quickly share how I’m feeling on Smood.it. Sometimes a simple emoticon (as opposed to a text status message) is the best way to describe my current mood and Smood.it makes this possible.

While the community does not seem very active, it may just be because it is hard to find other users (besides clicking on tags). Also, there doesn’t seem to be a way to “like,” comment or reply to others’ smoods. Of course, these are just some of the missing functionalities that come with an early beta site, so I’m anxious to see how Smood.it progresses.

Once again, here’s another site that I’d really love to use often and hope that I will remember to do so. What are your thoughts?

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How to Solve the Blogging Puzzle

This post is by Kiesha of WeBlogBetter.

Have you solved the blogging puzzle? Or are you just puzzled?

As a kid, when winter break rolled around, I found myself with too much time on my hands. So I would occupy myself with 1000-piece puzzles. They kept me entertained for days.

But after several hours working on the puzzle, I always came to a point where I wanted to quit—a point where I became so frustrated that I just wanted to throw the whole box of madness up against the wall. I can remember feeling as if the makers of the puzzle were deliberately trying to trick me, like they’d left out some very important pieces to keep me from finishing the puzzle. I felt like there were some insider tips that I was not privileged to know.

I was so puzzled, I had no choice but to step away from the table for a while—to actually eat, use the restroom, and do other stuff I somehow forgot while in my frenzied quest.

While on my break, I would continue to think about the stupid puzzle. I’d think about where I’d gone wrong. Perhaps there were pieces that I thought should fit in one spot that actually belonged somewhere else entirely. The puzzle even occupied my mind while I was eating.

When I got back to the puzzle with fresh eyes, I’d start seeing many pieces that I’d overlooked before. I’d find the exact spot where those pieces I’d been trying to force into all the wrong places really belonged. I’d get my second wind and before I knew it, every piece would be firmly placed and the beautiful, big picture would emerge.

Fast forward a few decades. I still love puzzles, but I no longer have time for such frivolous time-wasting (okay, I admit it: I still partake occasionally). However, I’ve learned that there’s a lot to be learned about blogging from puzzles.

Build the frame first

This seems like the most common-sense thing to do, but it’s also very tempting to just dive in and start throwing things together. Yet, without the frame, it’s easy to lose sight of how all the other pieces fit together—the puzzle becomes a vague, nebulous thing that makes no sense. The frame sets the physical boundaries that enable an understanding of the puzzle’s dimensions and help you see the significance of each individual piece.

It’s the same with blogging. A blog requires the solid foundation of a good design that visually shows your readers how all of the pieces of your blog fit together, and makes it easy to navigate. In addition to visual design, your categories provide the framework that’s needed to understand the boundaries of your blog. By looking at those categories, a reader should instantly get an idea of what they might or might not find on your blog.

Look at the big picture

Honestly, I see blogging as my latest puzzle adventure. As I continue to dive deeper into the world of blogging, I discover new pieces of knowledge that I had missed before. As I digest each new piece of information that comes in the form of books and others’ blog posts, the big picture begins to develop.

Sometimes, I realize there are misplaced pieces. The good news is that I don’t have to know everything. With a little research, I can do just about anything. Sometimes, I just have to go back and keep digging through the same pieces I thought were useless before until I realize those are the very pieces I need. There were pieces of the blogging puzzle I rejected at first. I couldn’t see the point of SEO, for example. I had to go back and add that valuable piece to my knowledge bank later, once I saw its relevance to my blog.

It takes work and time

Blogging requires work and a commitment of time. Like a 1000-piece puzzle, it’s never finished in one day. You have to keep at it, piece by piece, until it finally starts looking more and more like the picture on the box—like the blog you sought out to create before the frustration hit.

I don’t care how bad a blog starts out. I believe that, if you continue to work at improving it, time becomes the best medicine—especially in the blogosphere, where new blogs come and old ones go every day. If your blog can stand the test of time, some level of success won’t be far off.

It requires focus

I learned the hard way that jumping all over the place from one area to the next really only sped up the frustration factor. Instead of focusing on one area until I had developed something I recognized, I would become fascinated by a new set of pieces and start working on a totally unrelated section of the puzzle.

When I first started blogging, I was so fascinated by affiliate marketing and making money online that I didn’t have time to develop the most important piece of all: content.

It’s no wonder so many people step away from the blogging table—there are so many different elements demanding our attention. These factors can leave you feeling frazzled, and pull you all over the place, robbing you of focus. Once I realized the importance of focusing on one area at a time (when in doubt, focus on content), I was able to accomplish so much more.

What I learned about puzzles so many years ago now informs my blogging. That’s the beauty of personal experience: there’s an important lesson to learn in everything we do—even something as seemingly useless as putting together a puzzle.

So what about you? Are you still trying to solve your blogging puzzle? Or are you so puzzled that you’re ready to give in? What tips can you add?

Kiesha blogs at WeBlogBetter, a blog devoted to offering blogging tips. Sheís a technical writer, writing instructor, and blog consultant for small business owners. Connect with her on Twitter @weblogbetter.

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