Blogging is a commitment… it takes time, energy and work to produce a respectable blog. What starts as a free site often begins to cost money and, every so often, you will wonder whether or not the returns are worth the effort.

A lot depends upon what you want from blogging. It may simply be a place to air your personal views, share your creative work. You may want to make money from blogging and have found that is not as easy as it may seem. It may be an author platform where you can engage with readers, or it may support a cause. What ‘returns’ might you get from blogging, and are they really worth the effort?

Eight years ago, I tentatively set up a WordPress blog, just to see if I could work out how to do it. I had no idea what blogging was about… or why…

Ciao, amici. Today’s post is a continuation of the Story Bible series. So far, we’ve had an overview and discussed the series premise and character sheets. Today, we’ll cover settings.

If you thought the character sheet was easy, you’ll love this one. It’s even simpler. And, if you aren’t creating brand new worlds (like a sci-fi or fantasy author might), you have even fewer fields to fill out. (Or, if you have OCD tendencies like me, you’ll fill them out anyway, but it’ll only take a few seconds.)

If you did an extensive and exhaustive job of describing the story world in the series premise section, you’ll already have a head start on completing this sheet.

I created a simple table in Word. If you’d like to download it (to use as-is or change it to suit your needs), just click on the graphic.

The first row is the…

Google Analytics and your own WordPress Statistics (available through Jetpack, if you’re self-hosted) can be among the most useful book marketing tools. Who visits you and which pages do they frequent the most? Do people find what they’re looking for? How long do they stay?

This is the kind of questions that a simple analysis of your traffic can answer. However, it’s easy enough to get lost among all the jargon. Page views, unique visitors, visits, pages per session… it’s enough to give anyone a headache!

Thankfully, ConnextDigital recently published an Infographic which can serve as the perfect cheatsheet. Bookmark this page and refer to it whenever you wish to remind yourself what bounce rate is and why it matters, or refer to the original post for even more marketing information.

A Useful Web Analytics Glossary

Let’s take a look at what each of the terms found here mean:

AdWords…