About 9 months ago, I discovered the world of Giveaways, Reviews and Social Networking. I already had a blog that I did just for fun among friends and family and so when I found out how you can integrate a blog, Twitter, Facebook, Stumble, Technorati, Digg and any number of the blogging communities into one great social engine, I was definitely hooked. I do believe it changed my life trajectory somewhat!
The thing is, I really didn't use a blog mentor or a coach. I just started from scratch and learned and am learning as I go, probably making horrible, glaring, stupid mistakes, but loving it nonetheless. A couple of things I learned JUST this week are:
- Blogger has Stats that you can look at to see how your blog is doing!. You can get where traffic is coming from, how many page views per hour, day, week, month, etc., what kinds of searches are being done to land someone on your page, etc. That is so cool. I knew that you could go to outside sources to get that info but it's so much easier to get it from your own blog source. I'm not sure if I just didn't notice this before or if it's a new feature. But I like! Just click on Stats and you will see everything I did!
- I just learned how to disable comments on a certain post. Say, if I'm done with a giveaway, I can disable more comments from coming in. (Not sure if I'll use it for that purpose, but very useful to know because you never know when you might need that feature!) Just go to EDIT POST, click POST OPTIONS, click DON'T ALLOW, SHOW EXISTING! Easy!
- I learned about a great tool for bloggers called screen capture software! It allows you to capture anything you see on your screen window including windows, menus, full screen, rectangular regions, web pages and even shots of moving images! Maybe now I can actually capture that tricky Random.org window to show winners of my giveaways!
Hugs,
Helena