I decided to start this experiment while reading the Entrecard blog post Startup Blog Project Part 1. Now I know Wildheart’s Works is not a start up blog and has been out there for at least two years and last year gained major momentum as a serious blog after moving it to its new home on Word Press last Oct. However, I wanted to see if by following Graham’s model I could continue to generate some decent traffic to my blog.
In his first phase he sets a goal of 100 drops per day on relevant blogs in his niche as well as making 17 comments on those respective blogs per day. For my experiment I am just targeting drops at this point and will implement commenting at a later time. Now one thing he mentions and I will stress it too is that you have to find a niche you are passionate about or at least actively interested in discovering new things in a niche that you always wanted to explore.
I chose to drop in the categories of graphic design, computers and internet and internet marketing. One thing that makes this whole process a lot easier is if you install the Entrebar if you are using Firefox as your browser. If you aren’t using Firefox as your browser the Entrebar will not work in any other browser so I recommend if you decide to try this that you at least install Firefox as a back up browser. On a side note I have kept Safari and Flock as backup browsers in case my Firefox gets a bug in it or something. I need Safari to access my schools web site as it does not support the latest version of Firefox. My school needs to get up with the times in a major way.
I started my endeavor on the 21st and had 520 credits. I ended this phase of my project on Aug 23rd with 849 credits. During this time I accrued 6 advert display credits, received 13 drops and drhowell.net.blog gifted me with 10 credits just for stopping by his blog during this time. I also bought an advert for 64 credits. This contributed to the generating of 35 hits to my blog from Entrecard users. My next phase is going to be going back to the 100 drops per day and then finding good well put together blogs that match or closely match my niche and making 17 comments per day.
Randa gave us some insight into web analytic’s and mentioned StatCounter.com and as I am a StatCounter.com user I thought I would expand on this aspect of web analytics. I am going to use my account for Wildheart’s Works as an example for my explaination for this.
First of course there is the registration process which is the standard process for any website.
I have the free account and this is what you get for free.
Log-Size
Page loads/Month
Price/Month
500
250,000
FREE
This is what they offer.
How does it work?
Inside every FREE StatCounter Account you can set up a StatCounter Project..
..and with every project you get Project Code + Log Space!
You put your code into your webpage and every time someone visits a webpage..
..the StatCounter Project code sends valuable information about the visitor back to your log.
StatCounter organises all this information into charts & lists to make your analysis easier..
..and if you have more than one site, you simply set up another StatCounter Project in the same account!
You get four different ways to display their code into your website or blog.
Visible Counter
This code will place a small, customizable number on your pages indicating to you and your visitors how many people have visited each page. The counter’s appearance can be adjusted using further options in this wizard.
Example:
Invisible Counter
The code generated by this option will make the counter invisible, and no indication to your visitors as to how popular a particular page is.
Visible Counter On Homepage Only
This option will generate two pieces of code - one for your homepage that will display the counter there, and one for your other pages which will make it invisible.
Button Only
This option will generate code that simply displays a StatCounter button - a great way to support the site!
Example:
TIP To install the code - click the installation and configuration icon beside your project name.
TIP To view your stats - click the real-time stats icon beside your project name.
Real-Time Stats and Visitor Reports
Install Code and Customise Project Settings
Control User Access to Project
Schedule Email Reports
Delete Entire Project
As you can see the key is explained very well. My Wildheart’s Works has been viewed 80 times this month and Kansans and Friends In Weight Loss has been view 58 times this month. Now the reason this is a useful page to look at is because you can see which projects are getting better views and overall traffic than others if you have multiple projects going on. You can see what projects may need more tweaking or look into your stats to see why your doing better on one project than the other.
Now this shows a significant drop from the beginning of the current reporting period to the end. The reason being is that I haven’t been able to post much to this blog since the PC switch.
The next piece is the popular pages detail. My post about How To Get The Most Out Of Cafepress is at the top of the pile. Then there is In The Spotlight Who I Am Tagging followed by various views for people looking for paint shop pro related information.
This is where you can start to get a good idea of what posts are working for you and what posts not so good. As there is a lot of people still looking for information on Cafepress I am sure that my hits for that article will continue well into the next several months.
There are arrows indicating what is called drilling down for further information.
This is what you can look at when you drill down the data.
When I clicked on recent activity it shows that I had three visitors last week. One came from Ontario Canada, one from Texas, and one from Connecticut. It also tells what time people viewed my pages as well. Now this is where you should pay attention if you look at your stats and your stat analysis program offers time tracking. This can help you determine when you should be putting up your best material on your web site or blog. When I look at the times people viewed my site I see a lot of folks tuning in around early afternoon and shortly before midnight. That is why I blog in the evening, because I want to get people as they are coming home from work,unwinding and getting on the PC to check email and surf the net.
The next is recent visitor map that can give you a good idea of where your visitors are coming from geographically. For me my top three countries are The United States, Canada, and Australia.
Visitor paths gives you a break down of exactly where your visitors are logging in at. It includes their IP address,there ISP provider, the date and time they came on to your site and what url they found you through you can then look into each entry and also find out the following:
Browser
Firefox 1.5.0
Operating System
Windows XP
Resolution
1024×768
Javascript
Enabled
This can be useful information for people who understand screen resolution and how to set up their sites to come to a happy medium for various screen resolutions. This excerpt show that a visitor uses Firefox,is using XP and has a resolution of 1024×768 and they have Java e enabled on their system. Now this can be useful if you need to know if having Java applications on your blog or site could benefit you or harm you. If you have enough users who have Java enabled it could be a wise thing to look into how to make it work for you.
Keyword Analysis looks like this for my site
8
8.99%
4th of july psp tubes
5
5.62%
cafepress
3
3.37%
psp tubes 4th of july
3
3.37%
july 4th psp tubes
3
3.37%
cafepress template
3
3.37%
how to tag my merchandise on cafepress
2
2.25%
pasting design onto cafepress template
2
2.25%
mark up cafepress
2
2.25%
cafepress templates
2
2.25%
paint shop pro tubes fourth of july
2
2.25%
tripleeffect
2
2.25%
hoverpsot
2
2.25%
ksandfriends
2
2.25%
4th of july psp tutorial
You can see that psp,July and Cafepress are the top keywords people use to find what they are looking for.
Search Engine Wars can tell you how well your getting searched on the search engines.
66
83.54%
Google
7
8.86%
Yahoo!
5
6.33%
Google Blog Search
1
1.27%
MSN
You can see that Google is the most used search engine people are using when they find their way to my blog.
That just about covers what I know about this great free Stat program. If your looking for a quality,and detail orientated stat tool I recommend this one. If you have any questions feel free to email me at joecheray@gmail.com.
This was done from how to create a background tutorial from yet again nansonsplace.com. I added the sparkles and the transparent orbs.
The reason I am doing this series- if you will -on nansonsplace in particular is because nansonsplace does an extensive amount of tutorials with gradients and I also love working with gradients because they give a design a very unique feel and look. Especially when you find the more metallic ones like gold,silver,copper, and bronze. When I finished my Web Tech U paint shop pro courses I looked for places online that focused on gradient tutorials and I came across nansonsplace and it was a great way to sink my teeth into the meat of paint shop pro and get my hands dirty and my creativity going.
See I like to do an equal amount of trying to make my own stuff and trying tutorials because if you don’t try tutorials then you can’t ever learn how they do that in the world of digital design. The tutorials give you the skill set needed to help you grow as a designer especially in the early stages of your career. Now I am not getting paid yet to do digital design but I have been doing this long enough and have seen changes in my skills drastically since I first bought paint shop pro 9 and today.
I learned how to make frames from a great tutorial found on nansonsplace.com. The fact that the process really is such an easy one just amazed me. I could spend hours making frames now that I know how to do them. You can make frames with textures,patterns,solid colors,gradients,tubes and brush art. Some I have made with patterns, some with gradients and some a combination of tubes and gradients or tubes and patterns. After revisiting nansonsplace I also noticed that you can add layers to frames too. I will try this some time and see what kind of results I get. For now please enjoy these frames and I hope you take some, but please make sure I get credit for them. Please credit them Wildheart’s Works wherever you use them.
I will give you the link to nansonsplace since I am not sure if copying and pasting their tutorial would qualify as a “Quick Guide” as per their TOU. To add my frames to your paint shop pro program simply right click on the frame you want, click save as, go to your paint shop pro files, find your frames folder click on it and your done. I know for the seasoned paint shop pro user this is a no brainer but there are those who like myself were paint shop newbies at one time that need step by step how to do things.
I did another experiment on doing a Photoshop tutorial with paint shop pro.
The first 60 x 60 pixel is the one I tried with paint shop that was geared toward Photoshop.
<--other than the color not being the same the effect came out about the same The second one is what I got with doing it the way it was supposed to be done for paint shop pro. <-- I like the end result for this one I am going to resize it and use it for backgrounds
I have the link around here somewhere in my history I had thought I bookmarked it but I couldn’t find it in my bookmarks I came across it while Stumbling yesterday. I was an idiot and didn’t Technorati it or Stumble it either. Yeah go ahead and say it I am such a freakin scatter brain. Well if I can find the link to the site I will for sure do a follow up post for you with the correct information.
This was found on my Stumbles in design sites yesterday I figured ok so I don’t have Photoshop yet so I tried to mimic the same results using paint shop pro settings. The above was an idea for a bubble wallpaper made with Photoshop for the Mac only I decided to try and make it using paint shop pro 9 for windows.
This was how to make woodgrain using Photoshop so I took it and used what similar settings I could find in paint shop pro 9 to see if I could come close and this was the end result. I couldn’t figure out how to get the knots in the wood so I took the mesh warp tool and tried to simulate bends in the grain instead.
If anyone would like a more detailed tutorial or references to the Photoshop tutorial please let me know. I am going to use the woodgrain on my 360 page to see how it looks for a background.
Ok I tried to find the link for my inspiration for this but I can’t at the moment. I am trying to work on putting more depth into my work. I took the tubes in paint shop pro that I used for this and used various sizes of each tube image to get the depth effect I was trying for. I didn’t want the sun to be overly obtrusive instead I wanted it to look like a soft glow in the sky. This took two nights to complete cause it was a lot of detailed work to try and do. I was looking through my bookmarks and have seen many tutorial sites that I have in there so I am going to try my hand at some of the tutorials and see what I can come up with. I never ever do them exactly like they say because I always end up not being able to download this effect or that effect but I do pretty good at getting it close.
August 26th, 2008 by jcheray
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