Anyone that owns a website shares one main question? How many people are viewing my website? Monitoring your web statistics helps you to know if you are getting your word out there.  In the beginning just a few daily visitors makes you happy. I remember when I was getting 10 visits a day, and I was excited, but most of want more the longer we have a web presence.  We want more and more people to find us. We want to know that the time and money we’ve spent on our sites are worth it. We want to know if more people are visiting our sites, and why did they come? What did they do once they were there? Buy monitoring your statistics you can find all that out and then make sure that the information people are reading, is great, and if possible, provide more information like it.  If your website is more static, you may want to know who is ending you traffic and look for similar ways to promote your site.

If you are just moving into a web presence, find a way to monitor your traffic now. At some point, it’s going to be important, nad it will be great to look back and where you started and where you end up after a little time.

I have missed you, but life seems to get so crazy in the spring. I hope that next spring will not be quite so hectic as it will be my 3rd year to teach the same classes so I should have most of my lessons ready.

So I’ll be posting a lot more here this summer and then hopefully on through the school year.

Some brief updates

I finished my 11th year this year in the classroom.

I just surprised Cameron with a Disney vacation.

Becka is pregnant and will be having my first grandson in September. She’s currently living about a 1/2 mile from me as well, and I LOVE having her back so close.

My sister-in-law is also pregnant, and I’ll have another niece in October.  She’ll be named after me. 

I’m still struggling to lose weight, but have a summer plan that I plan to implement as soon as I get back from Panama (leave on the 18th).  I’ve changed my diet a good bit, but still need to add in exercise.

Looking into adding more storage around the house so I don’t have to continue renting a storage facility in town.  Comparing different steel buildings right now and whether I should go that route or have my dad build another wooden one.

And now I’m ready to ease back into blogging on my different sites.

It’s that time  – it hits me from time to time.  It’s time to clean up around here (and my other sites), choose a new theme and redesign, and then look at the sites and see if they are where I want them or what I need to do to get them there.

I’ll probably start first with the clean up – especially in those sidebars where I’m advertising events that have ended and have random links like www.neckacne.net (that one’s gone).

Start watching for changes around here and on my other sites.  I’ve also picked up a new domain that I’m excited to start working on after new years with a goal of a “grand opening” in March.

As a blogger with multiple domains, I’m always on the lookout for new tools that give me useful info, make blogging faster, or more useful to my readers.  Tonight I have been evaluating a site called Blog Copy.

What does it do? It records and reports to you when data is copied from your site – words and images.

If you have multiple websites, you can gather reports from each site under one account.

Blog Copy codes work with WordPress and is compatible with Google Analytics.

It’s a pretty interesting concept. I signed up and am tracking this site and my review site, Southern Girl Reviews.  I’m anxious to see what the reports look like and then let you know what I think in a follow up post.