How Did I Know

I was surprised to see so many questions after yesterday's post. I guess I've been blogging so dang long that I forget not everyone knows my secrets. tee hee.....okay, so it isn't really a secret, and to be honest, half the time I have no idea what I'm doing, but I try.

Google Analytics is an amazing tool for any blogger. I'm sure BIG bloggers use it for all sorts of fascinating information, but I mainly use it to keep a watchful eye on what is drawing attention to my blog. Mainly, I watch to see what sites are referring to my blog, what searches are bringing folks to my blog, and which blog posts are getting a lot of views. I do NOT do this to figure out what is popular so I can make my blog more successful, I do this to see if any sort of inappropriate things are happening. For instance, early on in my blog days, I put up a photo of Sugar Bear at the age of 2 in a pink bikini. A year later, I started noticing a bunch of hits on that blog post. I was able to track it down to image searches on google. They were typing in "baby fat" and getting that shot. I was okay with that. However, I COULD have found out if it has been linked on an iffy website, if you know what I mean. If someone had taken a liking to my sweet little bikini clad Sugar, and posted a link on a chat room or something to other (nasty) individuals could take a look, I would have seen that, and been able to remove the post.

Google Analytics will give you OODLES of information, and learning to use it can be rough. I suggest getting help. It can be so daunting. After all these years, I still only know how to find a small fraction of the information available.

As you saw yesterday, one of the more interesting things to look at are the web searches people do that land them on your blog. It is really quite interesting, and can be a bit eye opening. This time, they were all pretty tame. I just chose a few from the last month to share. In the past....I've gotten some real whoppers.

If you have some basic questions, feel free to ask me....but I'm likely to refer you on to someone who knows what they are talking about. tee hee.....I'm truly a novice at this technology sort of stuff. I wish you luck....