Recently I’ve been working on a Social Media Marketing e-book and a friend who’s editing it sent it back with an important comment – not everyone will be able to understand it at its current level of readability, otherwise known as the level of education required for people to understand the text.
As soon as my friend made this comment, I realized I hadn’t thought about my audience’s reading level for years, since I first started writing professionally. While most of us take into consideration the audience for whom we’re writing, e.g. moms, teens, technopiles, etc, we forget that any writing we do geared towards the general public should be readable by everyone.
A couple sites like http://www.addedbytes.com/readability/ and http://www.criticsrant.com/bb/reading_level.aspx offer excellent tools for finding out the readability of your blog or web content.
Added Bytes uses these specific methods of scoring:
Web Analytics helps you track whats going on with your blog and helps you refine your sites goals and campaigns
Here are 7 excellent web analytics resources for your blog. I’ve specifically included several programs in here that have cool, useful resources like plugins and widgets for your blog.
Feedburner- Manages RSS Feeds and offers free blog analytics, tracks subscriptions, keywords and etc.
Mint - Excellent, self-hosted site analytics software. The fee is a one-time, $30 flat fee for a license, per site. Super cheap, and you get access to a ton of tools and plugins (called “Pepper”) that extend Mint’s basic feature set via their “Peppermill.”
Google Analytics – Ok so Google Analytics is still an ok free option, but keep in mind that it has some problems, namely underreporting. However, its still a good option for getting a general idea of what’s going on with your blog.
Feedjit - I had to include them in here, as they offer some excellent free widgets for your blog, all in real-time, including a live traffic feed, live traffic map, live recommended reading and live page popularity.
IndexTools – Recently acquired by Yahoo, and soon to be Yahoo Index Tools, they offer excellent options for web analytics, but the prices aren’t listed on the site, so you’ll have to do a little digging.
MyBlogLog – Great social networking site for those with blogs. It has the additional benefit of tracking your blog stats, cool widgets to show who’s visited your site and much, much more. Best of all, its free:)
HitTail.com: Excellent site analytics; their basic package offers man options and allows you to track up to 125 pages per month and up to 100k visitors. All for $9.95, which is a great deal.
