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It’s that simple.  Tell me what you think.  I’m closing this poll next Thursday night and if you want linkage I’ll try and keep up the weekly links or focus more on original content.

So I have a whole mess of links accumulated over the last month, but I’m still going to keep this very focused and the best of the best here.  Enjoy.

• Why Recipients Call Your Mail Spam – Respecting subscriber permission is still the most important thing you can to do prevent spam complaints. But, it also means that permission alone isn’t enough insurance against spam complaints.
• The Internets isn’t just something the kids use…you can raise big bucks on it too! -The Chronicle of Philanthropy released its annual online fundraising statistics this week and I’m sure many old-school fundraisers (who think the Internets is just something the kids use) were surprised at the results.
• Sex, Drugs and Software Lead Spam Purchase Growth – 29% of Internet Users have Purchased from Spam, According to New Research from Marshal
• On Domain Names, Size and Quality DOES Matter! – The conclusion: all other things being equal (e.g., marketing budget, content quality, design, affiliation with larger websites and so on), a website with a good domain name will always outperform a competitor with a bad or average domain name.
• Study: Fastest Growing US Companies Rapidly Adopting Social Media – A one year follow up on a study of social media adoption at 500 of the fastest growing companies in the US has found that familiarity with and use of blogs, podcasting, wikis, online video and social networking has skyrocketed in 2008 to nearly double what it was in 2007. 77% of respondents now report at least some use of a social media tool
• Chicago Tribune’s Social Media Evolution – Last March, the Chicago Tribune assembled a four-person social media task force to help modernize the stodgy media giant by integrating the bright and shiny social media world of Facebook, Digg, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter.
• Top 14 power words for email, advertising and communications – Your emails or advertising is missing to get answered ? Sales letters not selling ? Ads not getting clicked on ? You want to catch attention ? Use these power words:
• Facebook Is Not Only The World’s Largest Social Network, It Is Also The Fastest Growing – Even though Facebook is now the largest social network in the world, —with 132 million unique visitors in June—it is also still the fastest growing. (At least among the major social networks). According to figures compiled by comScore, Facebook’s visitor growth is up 153 percent on an annual basis.
• Is Facebook the Most Popular Social Bookmarking Service on the Web? – How do website readers prefer to share stories they find with friends? According to the company behind the widely used sharing widget ShareThis, after emailing a link, the most popular method of sharing is now Facebook.
• Top 10 Tech-Savvy College Towns – From innovative courses to citywide wifi, some college towns know how to bring out your inner geek. Computer science majors and casual Web junkies alike appreciate the high-tech offerings in these college towns.
• 82% Of Phone Users Don’t Send Text Messages At All – Looks like it is time to roll out the conflicting studies. Last week, we saw that three-quarters of phone shoppers list SMS capabilities as the number one must-have feature. This week, however, we learn that fully 82% of U.S. mobile phone users don’t send text messages at all!!! Is just 18% of the population really accounting for all those billions and billions of messages each month?
• The Ultimate Guide To SERP Click Through Rates – The ultimate guide to where people click. This data is the result of 36,389,567 searches and 19,434,540 clicks. The results make for interesting reading…
• How to Measure Social Media ROI for Business – Social media measurement is one of those topics about which everyone has an opinion, but nobody agrees on the solution. Here are a few pointers.
• Can New Media Be Taught in Schools? – Old media is slower, less compelling and more expensive than many emerging media online. It’s also more professional, often of higher quality and generally easier to monetize.
• You Should Probably Read This. – An extensive report about how to “Recruiting Millennials: How Official Admission Blogs Depict Colleges and Universities From a Public Relations Perspective”

And this week, it could be the final if you vote weekly links off the island, the funny video is one that either you will find hilarious or well… a complete waste of three minutes.  Hopefully it’s the first.

Related posts:

1. Links of the Week Feb 22th, 2008
2. Links of the Week August 29th, 2008
3. Links of the Week July 11th, 2008

Installing the Code

Installing the code is the easy part.  I would definitely recommend going with the new ga.js at this point.  If you are still on the old urchin.js then find some time to swap everything over.

The above code should look fairly similar to your account.  The one line that I’ve underlined and added is to set your domain name.  What this allows you to do is to track sub-domain traffic and split it out.  This will be discussed in more detail later.

Setting up a Profile

When setting up a profile make sure to fill out all the options.  Specifically make sure that you fill out the Default Page option and the Site Search information.

The default page setting will help you get rid of redundancy in the system.  There is nothing more annoying than seeing data for something like www.wofford.edu/ along with www.wofford.edu/default.aspx when we know that they are the same page.  Go ahead and save yourself the trouble in the long run by setting this up now.  Secondly, the Site Search provides valuable information about what individuals are searching for on your site.  You don’t need Google search for your internal site, turning this option on will work with any internal search that you use.  The Query Parameter is simply the value that you return in your search string.  For example on wofford.edu if you run a search for “apply” then the returning URL would look like this (http://www.wofford.edu/search/searchSiteResults.aspx?keyword=apply).  As you can see the search parameter is keyword.  You might as well strip query parameters out of the URL because this will help clean your page and you are storing these results in the site search section now.

Setup Multiple Profiles

Google Analytics allows you to setup a max of 100 website profiles in an account.  Why not take advantage of this?  One of the tips I mentioned last week was to setup multiple profiles.  So what does that mean?

First I would recommend setting up a minimum of three profiles.

1. Default Profile
2. Raw Data Profile
3. Sandbox Profile

The Sandbox is where you can test and play with new filters (we’ll get to some of those in a second) among other things.  The Default is where your main data is going to be saved and the Raw Data is the profile that you keep that doesn’t have any filters simply the raw data, just in case something bad happens.  Two of the obvious examples of additional profiles in the picture above are athletics.wofford.edu and Off Campus Traffic.  I can pull reports specifically about this sort of traffic or pull from the Default data which includes everything.  You will also notice that I stashed a z at the front of a few of the profiles so they get filtered to the bottom.  This is just another handy tip to help keep your profile list clean and organized.

Some Basic Filters

• All Lowercase Filter: The first filter is the lowercase filter.  This filter is one that would be wise to apply to EVERY report.  I know I said the Raw Data profile doesn’t have any filters, but this filter wouldn’t hurt to be applied to it.  The lowercase filter removes duplicates from the system that you might have by making all characters in your reports lowercase.  The best example of this would be wofford.edu/default.aspx and wofford.edu/Default.aspxshowing up as two seperate entries when they are obviously the same page.
  For more information about this filter I highly recommend reading Some Basics about Lowercase Filters over at the ROI Revolution blog.
• Exclude all Traffic from an IP Address: This filter sounds pretty easy, but the first reaction most people will have is that excluding one address isn’t what I want to do.  I want to exclude all the IP addresses from a location, how do I do that?  Google anticipated this and created a nice little page that will provide you with the code to put for this request.  This Google Analytics Help Center will help you create the regular expression code to exclude traffic from a range of IP addresses.
  The perfect example for this filter is to track a college’s website traffic from off campus.
• Tracking Sub Domain Traffic: As I showed in the profiles above we have athletics.wofford.edu split out in a separate profile so that we can look at data just to that sub domain.  To do this requires two extra filters.  One filter is applied to the sub domain profile while the other is applied to the default profile.  Instead of trying to explain all this in detail Justin Cutroni over at Analytics Talk put together a post on Tracking Sub Domains with Google Analytics back in November that I followed then and have been enjoying the results since.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully that is enough to get you more effectively using your Google Analytics account and starting to clean up your data.  Just a few days ago on the Official Google Analytics Blog it was announced that Benchmarking Data Now Live! This should add a whole new level to web analytics and simply another reason to jump on board this wonderful service.  I will admit though that I’m a little confused about exactly what category College websites fit into?  Maybe non-profits?

There are lots of great blogs out there on Google Analytics a few that I regularly read and would recommend include:

• The Official Google Analytics Blog- this blog is surprising updated quite regularly and every gem posted is must know material.
• Analytics Talk- This blog is only posted to when something really helpful or important comes out so it’s something to add to the feed-reader for those really important tips when they come out.
• Unofficial Google Analytics Blog- This blog run is run by the folks over their at ROI Revolution.  After meeting them last week they definitely know what they are talking about and their blog is a great starting point for a wealth of information.
• Occam’s Razor- This blog by Google’s very own Avinash Kaushik is a must add to the feed-reader.  Avinash wrote “Web Analytics: An Hour A Day” which is a must read book in Analytics circles.  I’ll admit I have yet to read it, but it’s the first things on my to do list this summer.  Read any post on his blog and you will feel like a smarter individual.
• Web Analytics World- Although this blog isn’t specifically about Google Analytics the author, Manoj Jasra, does a great job of regularly summarizing some of the industry news in the analytics world.

Related posts:

1. 7 Google Analytics Filters To Help Understand Your Visitors
2. 3 Quick Tips to Tag and Track with Google Analytics
3. Live Blogging: What the Heck Do All These Numbers Mean? Web Analytics for Higher Ed

1. Decide on a name first. The very first thing that has to be done when setting up a blog is to decide what the name of the blog will be.  How do you want to brand it?  What is it that you want to write about, decide on your niche, and choose an appropriate name?  You have to do this first because you can’t register a domain name unless you decide what the domain name that you want to use and if it’s available.  Try to keep it short and catchy.  InternetMarketing4HigherEducation.com well that’s just not going to work… who wants to type all that?  Although it’s most likely going to be available it’s just ridiculous.  Keep it short, I’d say no more than 12 characters before your domain type.  Personally I believe sticking with .com is best as this is the most recognized.  Buying a .info or .net might be a little cheaper on GoDaddy might be a little cheaper, but that’s just it…  it makes you look a little cheaper.  Also in most browsers you can type the domain name (example doteduguru) and hit ctrl + enter and it will wrap the http://www. + .com around your query.  Just a little tip, but it is another way to get people quickly to your site.
2. What blogging software to use. From everything I’ve seen there are three big blogging platforms that seem to dominate, Blogger, WordPress, and Typepad.  According to Alexa Blogger.com is the 12th ranked site in the world so it is by far the biggest blogging hosting system.  Wofford uses Typepad to host all their blogs so I was fairly familiar with their system.  WordPress was the wildcard.  I have heard lots of wonderful things about how customizable the system was and I knew that I was going to want to customize the mess out of the system so this looked good.  I also knew that WordPress was Open Source Freeware so I could download it for free and install it on my web server and do whatever I wanted with it.  I also read quite a few excellent reviews about WordPress.  WordPress it is so I downloaded the software.
3. Choose a hosting company. I use ixwebhosting, but I’ve been using them for years and already had a plan with them that I’ve used for side projects that I do for people.  For a WordPress blog BlueHost seems to be a well regarded and highly publicized host.  BlueHost is $6.95/month and they say that that includes your free domain name forever so you don’t have to go anywhere else to buy it.  I HAVE NOT used this service so I’m not recommending it just point it out.
4. Installing WordPress. (If you use a host that installs WordPress for you then you can skip this step)  Actually installing WordPress isn’t too difficult.  You can read all about it or look on YouTube for a video about how to install.  Once it’s installed and you have all the initial setup it’s time to customize time!
5. Decide on a Permalink structure. The VERY FIRST thing to do is decide on a Permalink structure.  There are many discussions about the best way to do this.  You can read about it here, here, here, and finally this one has a few tips from the infamous Matt Cutts.   I’ll let you decide for yourself how you want to setup permalinks, but it’s best to make this decision early and STICK WITH IT.  For completeness I choose to go with /id%post_id%-%postname%.html.  For me this follows the best of the SEO practices that I read and keeps the ID at the beginning so if by chance you have two posts named the same they are each unique.
6. Customizing WordPress with plug-ins. Now it’s time to dig into the real power of WordPress:  PLUG-INS!  There is literally hundreds of plug-ins, but I’m going to get into the vital ones that I chose were valuable.  Plug-ins are super easy to install and after reading the README on the first one you will quickly figure out how to install these things.
   • FeedSmith – FeedBurner is the de facto standard for RSS and this is the easiest way to setup FeedBurner on a WordPress blog.  FeedBurner is one of the few reliable way to track RSS feed data.  Go setup a FeedBurner account and tweak the settings to your liking.  I’d recommend setting up E-mail alerts though this also so users can keep up with your post through that means if they choose.
   • Google Analytics for WordPress – Of course your going to want to track traffic on your blog and the price of Google Analytics is right, it’s FREE!  Set it up early so you can track traffic from the beginning.  This plug-in doesn’t use the latest ga.js script but I’ve read that the programmer is plan on updating it with this.
   • Google XML Sitemaps– if you want to inform the search engines about your site and your priority of content then a sitemap is a must.  I actually had some issues and had to create the sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz files by hand and upload them to the server.  Also had to deactivate and activate the plug-in and wait a few minutes but everything went fairly smoothly at that point.  Set this puppy up and setup Webmaster tools on Google, Yahoo, and Live/MSN to submit your website so people will easily be able to find it on search engines.  Also as part of this install this plug-ins will create a robots.txt file for you.  Don’t know what this is you can find out more at robotstxt.org.
     This is also important and I would recommend adding the below to the file because you really don’t need or want a bot searching these folders eating up your bandwidth and it’s just pointless.

     User-agent: *
     Disallow: /wp-admin/
     Disallow: /wp-content/
     Disallow: /wp-includes/

   • WordPress.com Stats – Google analytics are great, but it doesn’t hurt setting up this free plug-ins to easily track stats.  One thing I’ve learned is that you really don’t want to dig into a Google Analytics account but once a month, but maybe you want to daily see how your stats are doing?  Well with this plug-in you can do that from the admin panel.

Well that’s enough for now.  With the above your blog will have the best chance of being found using solid SEO practices and your readers will easily be able to keep up with it through RSS and even e-mail subscriptions.  There is much more customizing you can do with Plug-ins and Themes, but this is the bare minimum to build an excellent blog.  The rest is more preference than anything.  I do plan on writing a follow-up post to explore some of the better WordPress plug-ins, where to find themes, and a little social networking advice.  I hope this tutorial has been helpful and thank you for taking the time to actually read it all the way through.

Related posts:

1. The Right Way to Setup a WordPress Blog and Why: Part 2
2. Google Analytics 101: Some Basic Setup Tips
3. Do You Join the Conversation or Stay at a Distance? Comments Welcome!