Now that your website is up and running, you will want to monitor traffic to the website. Here are four free tools you can use to analyze your website’s traffic — where it’s coming from, how many people are coming, and what they like about the site. You will want to use a variety of diagnostic tools as analytic algorithms are changing constantly and no one tool is complete and comprehensive.

Alexa
Alexa is a web-based tool that allows you to rank your website in comparison to others. For ten years, Alexa used an embedded toolbar on websites to establish their site rankings. This tended to skew their rankings in favor of tech-savvy blogs read by tech-savvy users. Just this month Alexa changed their ranking system to include more sources of website traffic data, making it a well rounded tool for analyzing your traffic and history. With Alexa, the lower your ranking, the better. Check it out at http://www.alexa.com/.

Technorati
Technorati( http://www.technorati.com/) is a blog ranking tool that compares your blog to every other blog, regardless of niche. Like Alexa, sites are rated numerically and monitoring your ranking is a good way to gauge your progress.

With Technorati, there are two scores — your rank and your authority. Your rank is where you stand in relation to other blogs — if your rank is 100,000 than there are 99,999 blogs ahead of you. Your authority is your perceived value in the blogosphere and its primary metric is inbound links.

The greater the number and variety of links to your site, the higher your Technorati authority will be. With Technorati, you want your authority to be a high number and your rank to be a low one.

Website Grader
Website Grader by HubSpot is a relatively new tool that analyzes both the external and internal factors that contribute to your website’s health as a whole. You can input the keywords you’d like your site to rank for and see how well you’re ranking, as well as comparing your site’s rank with competitors in your niche.

It gives a numerical value to your site based on dozens of factors. Site ranking is a numerical score from 0 to 100 – the higher the better. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data, website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others. The tool also has historical rankings, so you can see how your site and your competitors’ sites have improved over time.

Important note: Website Grader reports include references to meta tag data. Even when that data is either pulled in by the search engines in another manner (like descriptions) or is of zero relevance (like keyword meta tags), it tells you that the information is absent and the weight of that absence (their opinion of how important it is) is reflected in your “grade”. However, don’t worry about this, as meta data is fast becoming old hat in the quickly changing world of web development and search engine optimization. The search engines are catching on, but these “tools” sometimes don’t catch on as quickly. What’s more important is your site’s reach.

With these tools you can get a well rounded view of how your site is doing, both independently and compared to your competitors. They will help you fine tune your SEO strategies and increase qualified traffic to your website.

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As you build up your company blog, one of the primary objectives is to provide information that satisfies the needs of your reader community – customers, prospects and influencers at school sites and district offices. You also want to promote your product offerings as solutions for your community.

On a traditional website, these objectives can be difficult to accomplish without your content coming across as shameless self-promotion. In a blog, the two goals can be done easily in a way that doesn’t turn your readers off.

Here are 4 ways to connect with your blog community while furthering your educational publishing company’s business aims.

1. Case Studies.  When educators search the web for information, they are looking for answers and solutions. Use case studies to pull readers in through compelling storytelling and satisfy their urge to see a challenge resolved. When educators see examples of your products making the difference, you win them over.

2. Open Threads.  As you build an audience, periodically ask open-ended questions about what their needs are, or how your audience has attempted to resolve an issue in the past.  As people share their experiences with others, it builds a sense of community that links value with your blog and ultimately your brand.  An effective tactic is to look for the needs identified in open threads and develop case studies to respond to them.

3. Interviews with Readers.  If you identify thought leaders in your audience and conduct interviews with them on how they handle challenges in their school, district or curriculum area, you strengthen the sense of community and attract new visitors. If you ask questions in your article that touch on the needs your product offerings satisfy, you continue to plant seeds in your readers’ minds to view your offerings as more authoritative.

4. Reader Polls. We all love polls because they tell us where we and our needs and opinions compare to those in our same arena. Create a list of all of the needs your products address. Ask readers which needs are most important to them, and why.

Readers value the opportunity to share what’s on their mind, and the strategy builds anticipation for the final results of the poll. You can then use the results to emphasize some of the benefits of your products.

These four strategies help your educational publishing company create content that builds a blog community in a way that demonstrates that you understand the needs of your audience. This is compelling marketing as it is human nature to go where we feel most understood. It is also very human to do business with those people and companies we like and who best understand and meet our needs.

 Read more at Why Corporate Blogs are Important to Educational Publishers

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For a corporate blog to resonate with an audience of influencers, it needs to have a plan of action to help it meet that goal. Without a plan, there is no focus or continuity and the effort falls flat. In fact, a poorly executed blog can do more harm than good. Why? Because you’ve promised something you did not deliver.

Fortunately, creating a plan is fairly straight forward. It simply requires that you are clear about expectations, what your company wants to accomplish, and then committing sufficient resources to effectively realize the blog’s goals and objectives.

Here are some suggestions to maximize your investment in a company blog:

1. Determine Objectives
First, identify what you want to achieve with your corporate blog. You might want to highlight customer success stories, build profiles for reference customers, share your research, dive more deeply into the product back story, or simply establish your company as a content expert.

Other objectives include building a strong subscriber base, fostering a sense of community so that people continue reading your blog and asking for feedback on existing products and ideas for new offerings.

2. Determine Your Audience’s Objectives
Once you have identified your blog’s objectives from your company’s vantage point, step back and determine the objectives of your target audience. Make no mistake; they are different from yours.

The most important thing to understand is that this blog is not an opportunity for your company to pontificate on its key messages. It is an opportunity to create conversations around your key messages. This is an essential distinction. You must focus on meeting the needs of your audience first. Using this strategy will create strong, steady interest in your blog.

Talk to educators to discover their current pain points. What are they looking for that they can’t find? Talk to your customer service representatives. More than anyone else in your organization, they know what is on your customers’ minds. Monitor the content of educational conferences and seminars to ensure you are staying on top of current trends and issues.

3. Determine Meaningful and Memorable Content
Create a list of appropriate topics for blog postings and articles and decide who will write these. Is it written by one person or several people? There are advantages and disadvantages to both. In some ways, a blog is like a 24/7 news organization. You need a lot of content. It is essential to lock this down early.

Create a blog personality. What is the blog voice and tone to be? All blogs must find a way to become a compelling, must-read for their audience.

Create a schedule. An effective blog requires regular care and feeding. It is a dynamic, evolving website and should be a top priority for someone in your organization.

With these basic principles to guide you, a corporate blog can become a significant part of your overall marketing strategy as it helps you build an audience of supporters invested in your company’s success

Next Time: 4 Ways to Use Your Blog to Win Over Decision Makers

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